alt Hacker News> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken.
And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask. Yes, your diffs appear but they lack filenames. You've added this requirements to the prompt? Ok, filenames are back but they are font size 4, unreadably small. You want them well-seen? next week they become size 54, taking entire screen.. This is not a problem with regular AI development - you review the changes and test them a bit. But doing it day-to-day with no overview is just asking for trouble.
Replies
> "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask.
Surely you don't think that he literally meant to use those seven words as a bullet proof prompt, right?
I will never understand this way of responding literally and pedantically to verbal psudocode. He's leaving it as an exercise to the reader to specify "check that the software works as intended" because he could never possibly properly articulate a perfectly comprehensive QA and validation flow for every piece of software that would satisfy every individual's need.
I don’t auto-rebase but I definitely vendor in and choose to update on my own cadence.
> This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor...
But, at least you know the cost up-front.
Oh, wait...
I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible
Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing