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Left overnight to update one script, his agent came back with 180 scripts and about 100,000 lines

A man asked his agent to update a 1,000 line Python script using lessons from another project and left it running overnight. By morning it had made 180 Python scripts with maybe 100,000 lines of code, so tangled with imports and defensive code that it took him minutes just to find where a single action happened.

This one went wrong. Read what happened so you don’t hit the same problem.

How it works

  1. He asks the agent to update the script with lessons from another project
  2. He leaves it running overnight with no check in
  3. By morning the agent has created 180 separate scripts and about 100,000 lines
  4. He cannot trace where one action happens in the result

Why it’s worth knowing

The failure is the size. One script became about 100 times the code, and the owner could no longer find his way around his own tool.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
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