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Comment by bt1a | Hacker News Reader

It really is best in slot. Owe it to git, which has a particular synergy with a hallucination-prone but correctable system

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I like Aider but I've turned off auto-commit. I just can't seem to let the AI actually commit code for me. Do you regularly let Aider commit for you? How much do you review the code written by it?

The auto-commits of Aider scared the crap out of me at first too, but after realizing I can just create a throwaway branch and let it run wild it ended up being a nice way to work.

I've been trying to use Sonnet 3.7 tonight through the Copilot agent and it gets frustrating to see the API 500 halfway through the task list leaving the project in a half baked state, and then and not feeling like I have a good "auto save" to pick up again from.

I don't let it auto commit, either. I don't like committing in a broken state, and the llm breaks things plenty often.

What's wrong with committing in a broken state if you squash those into a working state before pushing?

Maybe nothing, I just don't work that way.

The beauty of git is that local commits don't get seen by anybody until you push. so you can commit early and commit often, since no one else is gonna see it, which gets you checkpoints before, during, and after you dive into making a big breaking change in the code. once you've got something you like, then you can edit, squash, and reorder the local commits and clean them up for consumption by the general public.

But to each their own!

I create a feature branch, do the work and let it commit. I check the code as I go. If I don't like it, then I revert to a previous commit. Other times I write some code that it isn't getting right for whatever reason.

When it's ready, I squash merge into main.

I originally was against auto commit as well, but now I can’t imagine not using it. It’s essentially save points along the way. More than once, I’ve done two or three exchanges with Aider only to realize that the path that we were going down was not a good one.

Being able to get reset back to the last known good state is awesome. If you turn off auto commit, it’s a lot harder to undo one of the steps that the model takes. It’s only a matter of time until it creates nonsense, so you’ll really want the ability to roll it back.

Just work in a branch and you can merge all commits if you want at the end.

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