AI/Coding/History/Phase/2 - Basic Single Edits
- AI Coding IDEs and extensions started to progress to be able to complete a logical chunk of work, though they weren't yet able to iterate on their own. They needed to be directly instructed about what changes to make.
- Sub-Phases
- At first, IDEs added the ability to edit a single file. This was surprisingly challenging, as regenerating an entire file from scratch could introduce subtle changes in places where it was not necessary, and editing git diffs to introduce changes to just certain lines was not something the models were very skilled at.
- Later, IDEs figured out how to let LLMs edit multiple files, though this initially was still in a "direct edit" phase where the coder would need to instruct the model which files needed to change and what change would be introduced. Without autonomous or agentic coding, this was prone to errors as LLMs struggled with the complexity of producing diff patches across multiple files.