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Small programming tricks

681 points · 294 comments · signa11

  1. kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
    A lot more tricks can be learned from just watching AI work. Instead of allowing AI to work autonomously, go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs. Just recently while doing performance optimization work, I found Opus using the `perf` command in ways I didn’t know possible. Just give AI a real task and carefully read what commands are used by the AI to solve the problem; most likely the AI uses a trick or two that you didn’t know existed.
    1. bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
      > go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs

      Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.

      1. kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
        They run in a container with no network access, no data access other than the project folder.
      2. TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
        So say people so afraid of LLMs they don't even use them :).

        The rest of us picks a level between "approve some" and "YOLO" depending on how much they worry about having to clean up the workspace afterwards. Encouraging using the repo and some dedicated per-session storage, while discouraging changes to global state (like installing packages system-wide) reduces cleanup problem to "every now and then `rm -rf` some agent session dirs".

        1. kittikitti · · focus · HN ↗
          The last time I did this, the AI was markedly worse and it took a few days of development time to undo it. Then Claude blamed me for it when asking about the root cause in a retrospective.
          1. Squeeeez · · focus · HN ↗
            Welll... If you lend $100 to a hobo, would you really blame them when they run away with it?
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