It’s funny to see where we are on model improvements.
Back when I was maintaining a coding harness around the time of Claude 3.5 we tried hash prefixes we tried line number prefixes we tried a lot of different approaches to making the model better at selecting edit blocks and ultimately at-least then fuzzy string matching won out.
We got lines-with-anchors working fine as a replacement strategy, the problem was that when you don't make the model echo what it's replacing, it's literally dumber at writing the replacement; we lost more in test failures + retries than we gained in faster outputs.
Makes sense when you think about how powerful the "think before answering" principle is for LLMs, but it's still frustrating
Back when I was maintaining a coding harness around the time of Claude 3.5 we tried hash prefixes we tried line number prefixes we tried a lot of different approaches to making the model better at selecting edit blocks and ultimately at-least then fuzzy string matching won out.