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Coding Models Are Doing Too Much | wh

nrehiew.github.io · 3,714 words · saved by 3 readers

AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to fix a simple bug (perhaps a single off-by-one error, or maybe a wrong operator). The model fixes the bug but half the function has been rewritten. An extra helper function has appeared. A perfectly reasonable variable name has been renamed. New input validation has been added. And the diff is enormous. I refer to this as the Over-Editing problem where models have the tendency to rewrite code that didn’t need rewriting. This matters more than it might seem. Code review is already a bottleneck and reviewers need to understand what changed, why it changed, and whether the change is safe. A model that rewrites entire functions, even correctly, makes this job dramatically harder as the code is now completely unrecog

Code for this post is available here . AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code. If you have used any of these tools in the past year, you have probably experienced something like this: you ask the model to fix a simple bug (perhaps a single off-by-one error, or maybe a wrong operator). The model fixes the bug but half the function has been rewritten. An extra helper function has appeared. A perfectly reasonable variable name has been renamed. New input validation has been added. And

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