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- Hacker News
- This is interesting. Is nobody training LLMs to repeat resolving issues by patches from real projects where refactoring is required, judging the refactor similarity and not just tests passing?by mordae
- IMO slop usually comes from overly defensive programming from LLMs. They’re loath to remove code and simplify, because unless we humans tell them some code / use case is unimportant, they have no reason to not care about it.
So agents can make these overly complex solutions trying to make bulletproof implementations and prevent regressions.
It requires a human to look at code, ask about complexity, and guide simplification by subtracting requirements implicit in the code.
by softwaredoug - For most things I find medium to be the highest quality output. However if I want it to do spatial reasoning or if I want it be funny / write something (not code) of almost-passable quality, then xhigh is where it's at.
- I have a simplify skill built from a rich hickey talk that basically solves the erosion and verbosity metrics SCB flagged (i.e. erosion and verbosity are way better and improve over time). However, after running the SCB benchmark I cannot find any evidence that it actually improves test pass rate trajectories. Food for thought on maintainability metrics.
- Is there a reasonable way to run a representative subset myself?
Edit:
> For folks who want to try to repro these findings: I used the pinned v1.0 catalog, the stock just-solve prompt, seed 42, the any-case runner pass policy, and Docker with Python 3.12 and uv.
by hedgehog - what are the odds of as purely side effect of benchmaxing that the models get actually good because the benchmarkers the nittier they get the better the model has to become?
corrolary: just as cars evolved for worst because they were measured for "race numbers", what are the odds that the models just become "that uber nerd that degrades anyone who doesn't follow all his uber-rules for uber-code" and in the process start creating code that cannot be read or maintained?
by xlayn - Very interesting. If I’m honest with myself it could be very much a reality that I would be better off in only using for medium effor size tasked instead of trying to "offload" the necessary architecture thinking to "high" or even more.
They are good for inspiration though, but maybe I rather let me build a demo and then tell a medium model what I want from it.
by jwpapi - Astra writes well (which is why I often like to work with it over Claude), but it tends to produce code golf that's borderline unreadable, like completely omitting line breaks. I thought I had something funky with my config, but it seems to be a known issue.
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
EDIT: You can search for "tenobrus astra" on X, but link removed.
The generated code certainly does what's asked of it, but it's as sloppy as anything else I've seen. I don't think this benchmark can control for that. Maybe if it had a metric for minimum diff to satisfy the new requirement with the existing constraints on dead code etc?