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▲ nater5000 3 hours ago

Agents use source control, too. It's a pretty important part of the development process to understand how code has changed.

For example, you can imagine, at the extreme, that agents could get caught in code change loops: a code change seems appropriate, it is implemented, it turns out there's some external factor which makes it not appropriate, the change is reverted, then that same code change seems appropriate again, etc.

Obviously you can prevent that from occurring with some extra infrastructure in-place, but at that point you're basically creating source control.

▲thwarted 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Agents use source control, too. It's a pretty important part of the development process to understand how code has changed.

This is a great idea, now they just have to use/do it. Maybe they can use it effectively by cloning the repo and having all the history at hand, rather than continuously scraping web pages with git content formatted for human brwosing.

▲rbehrends 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Agents use source control, too.

This is true, but at 30,000 merges a day we're talking about nearly 1 million merges a month, and purely autonomous agentic merges tend to be noisy. Is this still a tractable problem, even for an agent? Do revisions older than a few days, other than perhaps release snapshots, have any relevance for such a process?

▲myhf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In theory, an agent could use git-bisect to identify when a bug was introduced. But the operator would have to be more interested in understanding the root cause than in fixing the current form of the bug...

▲wongarsu an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For me, Claude regularly looks at git blame after identifying a bug, then reads the commit message and other changes in the commit to understand the context of why that behavior was introduced like that. I wouldn't be surprised if it pulled out a git bisect

Then again, my standard instruction is something like "{bug description}. Find the root cause and propose possible solutions" so I guess I fit your profile

▲genxy 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Same, I basically take the derivative of a bug wrt every major dimension before I fix it.

▲caaqil an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> the operator would have to be more interested in understanding the root cause than in fixing the current form of the bug...

Can you even do the latter without the former?

▲j45 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In this sentence who would be understanding the code changes, humans?

▲simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The agents obviously.. I thought that was obvious.

▲j45 an hour ago | parent [-]

That's not super reassuring, until I know they can read, remember, and reference reliably at suitable complexity.

▲j45 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And which is understanding the code changes meant for?

▲LadyCailin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just have the agent rederive the revert, based on the facts of whatever made the change inappropriate.

▲jack324 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]