Incredibly frustrated with seemingly non-relevant code changes

I’m running in circles with Agent. I’ve deployed some amazing apps with this thing, but despite their reports of it getting better, I find the performance degrading.

I will have nearly every function ready for deployment, then make one change to something, for instance, the profile picture upload. And it will break 3 of the other COMPLETELY unrelated features. And I do really mean unrelated - not even in the same ballpark.

Agent goes absolutely rogue so often that I don’t even want to use it, at least Assistant tells you what its doing and why.

Anyone else?

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Hey man! I noticed that you have posted a few posts sharing your negative experience - I feel you! I totally understand how you feel when you spent a lot of time and the agent is just not cooperating.

One suggestion is to walk away for a bit. Come back with a refreshed mind. I’ve spent hours banging my head on the same issue over and over but it turned out to be an easy fix.

Okay back to your original topic:

It sounds like you are only relying on agent’s rollback feature to keep the development history. I used to do the same thing but I find the best practice is to connect your Replit App to Github.

Once you built your app to be MVP, immediately push to Github as the main branch. Then you create a branch to add features to this. You can easily spin up another Replit project and sync that side branch with Replit and have the agent adding features to it. This way no matter how the agent messed up your code, you can always revert back to the state you are happy with and restart from there. it’s much easier and less costly than having a super long chat going.

Huge kudos to @kody for showing me how to do this lol

Hope this helps you man! Don’t be discouraged! You totally got this!

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I’m using Git - but the commits and descriptions leave a lot to be desired, and I’ve had a helluva time getting git restores to make sense. The problem is agent affecting things far and wide, so it becomes a total ratsnest.

Do you use Branch?

I agree with you that the git commit comments from Agent is not the best. If you follow a good workflow, you should be able to have a pretty clean development experience.

Check out this: Tips on Rollback and Version Control

Boy that escalated quickly lol

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Hey man! Sounds like you are really passionate about your project!

From your words I can tell the reason the agent “hurt” you so much is because you care about this project A LOT! Congrats on finding a problem that you are so passionate about and willing to endure the pain.

I don’t have any specific advice for you. Just want to remind you to take a break and walk away. Go get some fresh air and some sleep before circling back to the project.

I shared this in another thread: So think about this as an opportunity: adversity is the best way to weed out your competition! If you have the tenacity to push through the challenge and launch your app, you have the speed to market.

You are also in that thread: Agent has messed up your entire code that seems to be working just fine until you decided to make one change? Do you feel this way? - #6 by robinbobinpopin

Hope this helps you

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Good to hear you are thriving! And you can always lean on community for support - whether technical or emotional. Cheers!

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Happens to me all the time - sometimes I catch it, sometimes I dont. But when I do catch it, I am very puzzled why it made this extra change. I think it is inferring intent, and then just takes it on itself to make additional changes.

I have to provide EXPLICIT instructions to not touch any code, nor server settings or network configuration, that is not directly related to the task we are working on.

If I say that, it works fine. If I don’t, it makes a mess. Every time.

I wish they would build that in to the prompt, or have a check box.

Try this workflow:

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Robin you really are a gem on these forums! Thank you for all your sincere and positive posts. If we were all like you we’d be an interplanetary species already :rofl: I will try to take a page out of your book.

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You are too kind! That’s what a community is for!

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One other thing I recommend is periodically having Agent “refactor” your codebase. Every so often I’ll run a maintenance task where I prompt something like “We’ve had errors and issues periodically for the past few projects. Can you review your codebase and look at ways to optimize, drive efficiency, reduce unnecessary code and make the app more resilient?”. This usually helps clean up any issues that might have come from hallucinations on other projects.

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This completely hosed every project I tried it on. Way too vast of a prompt.

Interesting! Bummer that it didn’t work out. I think you can definitely specify it further. That was just a sample. I do things like remind it not to mess anything up and/or reduce functionality. But the point is that it can make itself more efficient

“I do things like remind it not to mess anything up and/or reduce functionality”

How do you do this. It’s our like you write “don’t fk it up” in each prompt?

This is what I put in literally every single agent request (I made a key on my Stream Deck for it)

DO NOT TOUCH ANY CODE THAT IS NOT RELATED TO THIS NEW REQUESTED FEATURE. DO NOT TOUCH NETWORK SETTINGS. YOU ARE ONLY TO WORK ON THIS ONE REQUESTED FEATURE.

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Lmao :joy:. Ok
Will start using this strict warnings

How successful has this method been

It honestly works well, but you have to enter it every time the agent has a question for you that you reply to.

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