GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

I had a fun result the other day from Claude. I opened a script in Zed and asked it to "fix the error on line 71". Claude happily went and fixed the error on line 91....

1. There was no error on line 91, it did some inconsequential formatting on that line 2. More importantly, it just ignored the very specific line I told it to go to. It's like I was playing telephone with the LLM which felt so strange with text-based communication.

This was me trying to get better at using the LLM while coding and seeing if I could "one-shot" some very simple things. Of course me doing this _very_ tiny fix myself would have been faster. Just felt weird and reinforces this idea that the LLM isn't actually thinking at all.

Sounds like operator error to me.

You need to give LLMs context. Line number isn't good context.

Imagine saying to another software engineer "you only gave me the line number, that's not enough context"