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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'".

This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.

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"NOT approved!"

"The user said the exact word 'approved'. Implementing plan."

Relevant comedy scene from Idiocracy (2006):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUcSb3PgeM

Lol it only took 20 years

I feel cheated, it's 2026. Where are the holograms and flying cars and orbital habitats?

Instead it's Idiocracy, The Truman Show, Enemy of the State, and the bad Biff-Tannen timeline of Back To The Future II.

And Biff is president!

There’s an extension to this problem which I haven’t got past. More generally I’d like the agent to stop and ask questions when it encounters ambiguity that it can’t reasonably resolve itself. If someone can get agents doing this well it’d be a massive improvement (and also solve the above).

Hm, with my "plan everything before writing code, plus review at the end" workflow, this hasn't been a problem. A few times when a reviewer has surfaced a concern, the agent asks me, but in 99% of cases, all ambiguity is resolved explicitly up front.

what gung-ho, talented-but-naive junior developer has ever done that?

In planning I sometimes add ”ask me questions as we go to iron out details and ambiguities.” Works quite well.

This. Just asking it to ask you questions before proceeding has saved me so much time from it making assumptions I don’t want. It’s the single most important part of almost all my prompts.

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