aider/docs/unified-diffs.md

Fixing GPT-4 Turbo laziness with unified diffs

Aider now asks GPT-4 Turbo to use unified diffs to edit your code when you request new features, improvements, bug fixes, test cases, etc. This new support for unified diffs massively reduces GPT-4 Turbo's bad habit of "lazy" coding.

There are abundant anecdotes about GPT-4 Turbo writing half completed code filled with comments that give homework assignments to the user like "...add logic here..." or "...omitted for brevity...". Aider's new unified diff edit format significantly reduces this sort of lazy coding, as quantified by dramatically improved scores on a new "laziness" benchmark suite.

Aider's new benchmarking suite is designed to both provoke and quantify lazy coding. It consists of 39 python refactoring tasks, which ask GPT to remove a non-trivial method from a class and make it a stand alone function. GPT-4 Turbo is prone to being lazy on this sort of copy/paste task, by leaving a comment like "...include the body of the original method..."

This new laziness benchmark produced the following results with gpt-4-1106-preview:

• GPT-4 Turbo only scored 15% as a baseline using aider's existing "SEARCH/REPLACE block" edit format.
• Aider's new unified diff edit format raised the score to 65%.
• A system prompt based on widely circulated folklore performed no better than baseline. This experiment used the existing "SEARCH/REPLACE block" format with an additional prompt that claims the user is blind, has no hands, will tip $2000 and has suffered from "truncated code trauma". This prompt scored only 15% on the refactor benchmark.

The older gpt-4-0613 also did better on the laziness benchmark by using unified diffs. The benchmark was designed to work with large source code files, and 28% of them are too large to use with June GPT-4's 8k context window. This significantly harmed June GPT-4's performance on the benchmark.

• The June GPT-4's baseline was 26% using aider's existing "SEARCH/REPLACE block" edit format.
• Aider's new unified diff edit format raised June GPT-4's score to 59%.

Before settling on unified diffs, I explored many other approaches. These efforts included prompts about being tireless and diligent, use of OpenAI's function/tool calling capabilities and numerous variations on aider's existing editing formats, line number formats and other diff-like formats. The results shared here reflect an extensive investigation and a large number of benchmarking runs of many approaches.

The result is aider's new support for a unified diff editing format which outperforms other solutions by a wide margin. The rest of this article will describe the new unified diff editing format and aider's new refactoring benchmark. We will discuss some key design decisions involved in this new format, and evaluate their significance using ablation experiments.

Unified diff editing format

The design and implementation of aider's new unified diff editing format helped clarify some general principles, which I think are applicable to any effective GPT-4 code editing format:

• FAMILIAR - Choose an edit format that GPT is already familiar with.
• SIMPLE - Choose a simple format that avoids escaping, syntactic overhead and brittle specifiers like line numbers or line counts.
• HIGH LEVEL - Encourage GPT to structure edits as new versions of substantive code blocks (functions, methods, etc), not as a series of surgical/minimal changes to individual lines of code.
• FLEXIBLE - Strive to be maximally flexible when interpreting GPT's edit instructions.

A helpful shortcut here is to have empathy for GPT, and imagine you are the one being tasked with specifying code edits. Would you want to hand type a properly escaped json data structure to invoke surgical insert, delete, replace operations on specific code line numbers? Would you want to trigger an error and be forced to start over after any typo, off-by-one line number or flubbed escape character?

GPT is quantitatively better at code editing when you reduce the burden of formatting edits by using a familiar, simple, high level and flexible editing format.

Choose a familiar editing format

Unified diffs are perhaps the most commonly used format for showing changes to code, because it's the default output format of git diff:

$ git diff hello.py
...
--- a/hello.py
+++ b/hello.py
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 def main(args):
     # show a greeting

-    print("Hello!")
+    print("Goodbye!")
     return

Choosing such a familiar, popular output format means that GPT has seen many examples in its training data. GPT has therefore been extensively trained to generate text that conforms to the unified diff syntax. We won't need to provide many details and examples in the system prompt, as it knows this format by name.

Unified diffs are usually intended to be consumed by the patch program. They need to accurately reflect the original and updated file contents, otherwise the patch command will fail. Having GPT specify changes in a well-known format that is usually consumed by a fairly rigid program like patch seems to encourage rigor. GPT is less likely to leave informal editing instructions in comments or be lazy about writing all the needed code.

With unified diffs, GPT acts more like it's writing textual data intended to be read by a program, not talking to a person.

Use a simple editing format

Aider's previous benchmark results made it clear that simple editing formats work much better than complex ones. Even though OpenAI provides extensive support for structured formats like json and function calls, GPT is worse at editing code if you use them. I repeated these and many other similar benchmarks against GPT-4 Turbo, and again reached these same conclusions.

Informally, this is probably because stuffing source code into JSON is complicated and error prone. It likely takes a lot of the model's attention to escape and wrap code in JSON containers. Wrapping the python code print("On Windows use \"C:\\\"") as valid json is pretty painful and error prone: "print(\\"On Windows use \\"C:\\\\\\"\\")" Due to escaping issues GPT's code is often syntactically incorrect when it's unpacked from the JSON container or the JSON decode just fails entirely.

On the other hand, the core of the unified diff format is extremely simple. You include a hunk of the file that needs to be changed, with every line prefixed to indicate unchanged, new or deleted lines.

A unified diff looks pretty much like the code it is modifying.

The one complicated piece is the line numbers found at the start of each hunk. They look something like this: @@ -2,4 +3,5 @@, which indicates that the hunk will change lines 2-4 in original file into lines 3-5 in the updated file. GPT is terrible at working accurately with source code line numbers. This is a general observation about any use of line numbers in editing formats, backed up by many quantitative benchmark

So aider tells GPT not to include line numbers, and just interprets each hunk from the unified diffs as a search and replace operation:

This diff:

@@ ... @@
 def main(args):
     # show a greeting

-    print("Hello!")
+    print("Goodbye!")
     return

Means we want to search the original source file for all the space and minus - lines from the hunk:

def main(args):
    # show a greeting

    print("Hello!")
    return

And then replace them with all the space and plus + lines:

def main(args):
    # show a greeting

    print("Goodbye!")
    return

Simple, right?

Encourage high level edits

The example unified diffs we've seen so far have all been single line changes, which makes them pretty easy to read and understand. Consider this slightly more complex change, which renames the variable n to number:

@@ ... @@
-def factorial(n):
+def factorial(number):
     "compute factorial"

-    if n == 0:
+    if number == 0:
         return 1
     else:
-        return n * factorial(n-1)
+        return number * factorial(number-1)

The following "high level diff" of the same change is not as succinct as the minimal diff above, but it is much easier to see two different coherent versions of the factorial() function.

@@ ... @@
-def factorial(n):
-    "compute factorial"
-
-    if n == 0:
-        return 1
-    else:
-        return n * factorial(n-1)
+def factorial(number):
+    "compute factorial"
+
+    if number == 0:
+        return 1
+    else:
+        return number * factorial(number-1)

Aider's system prompt strongly encourages GPT to produce these high level diffs. This prompt makes GPT better at producing correct diffs, which can be successfully applied to the original file.

Experiments without "high level diff" prompting produce a 30-50% increase in editing errors, where diffs fail to apply or apply incorrectly and produce invalid code. When a patch fails, aider needs to ask GPT for an updated version of the diff. This takes time, costs tokens and sometimes fails to result in a successful edit even after multiple retries.

There are probably a couple of reasons why high level diffs improve code editing performance:

• It's easier to produce diffs that both correctly match the original code and correctly produces the intended new code. There is less risk of getting confused while generating a series of surgical edits mixed into existing code.
• The high level hunks often contain more lines than a surgical version, so they are less likely to accidentally match unrelated parts of the original file. This is important because GPT can't reliably give us line numbers to specify exactly where in the file to make the change.

Be flexible when applying edits

GPT frequently makes errors when generating diffs, which can prevent them from being correctly applied to edit the code. These imperfect diffs exhibit a variety of problems:

• GPT forgets to include semantically irrelevant details. Often GPT forgets things like comments, docstrings, blank lines, etc. Or it skips over some code that it doesn't intend to change.
• GPT forgets the leading plus + character to mark novel lines that it wants to add to the file. It incorrectly includes them with a leading space as if they were already in the file.
• GPT jumps ahead to show edits to a different part of the file without starting a new hunk with a @@ ... @@ divider.

As an example of the first issue, consider this source code:

import sys

def main(args):
    # show a greeting

    print("Hello!")
    return

main(sys.argv[1:])

The diff below is missing the "show a greeting" comment line, and represents a common type of mistake GPT might make. When we search for the minus - lines, we won't find them in the original file because of the missing comment.

@@ ... @@
-def main(args):
-
-    print("Hello!")
-    return
+def main(args):
+
+    print("Goodbye!")
+    return

Aider tries to be very flexible when applying diffs, in order to handle defects. If a hunk doesn't apply cleanly, aider uses a number of strategies:

• Normalize the hunk, by taking the minus - and space lines as one version of the hunk and the space and plus + lines as a second version and doing an actual unified diff on them.
• Try and discover new lines that GPT is trying to add but which it forgot to mark with plus + markers. This is done by diffing the minus - and space lines back against the original file.
• Break a large hunk apart into an overlapping sequence of smaller hunks, which each contain only one contiguous run of plus + and minus - lines. Try and apply each of these sub-hunks independently.
• Vary the size and offset of the "context window" of space lines from the hunk that are used to localize the edit to a specific part of the file.
• Combine the above mechanisms to progressively become more permissive about how to apply the hunk.

These flexible patching strategies are critical, and removing them radically increases the number of hunks which fail to apply. Experiments where flexible patching is disabled show:

• GPT-4 Turbo's performance drops from 65% down to 56% on the refactoring benchmark.
• We see a 9X increase in editing errors on aider's original Exercism benchmark.

Refactoring benchmark

Aider has long used a benchmark suite based on 133 Exercism python exercises. But these are mostly small coding problems, usually requiring only a few dozen lines of code to solve. GPT-4 Turbo was typically only lazy on 2-3 of these exercises: the ones with the largest amount of code and which involved refactoring. Rather than fully completing the refactor, GPT would often just add a comment referencing old code like "...copy $USD formatting code here...".

Based on this observation, I set out to build a benchmark based on refactoring a non-trivial amount of code found in fairly large source files. To do this, I used python's ast module to analyze the Django repository.

The goal was to search the Django repository to:

• Find source files that contain class methods which are non-trivial, having more than 100 AST nodes in their implementation.
• Focus on methods that are part of a larger class. We want to find methods which are less than half the code present in their containing class.
• Find methods that do not make any use of their self parameter. This means they can be trivially refactored out of the class and turned into a stand-alone top-level function.

We can then turn each of these source files into a task for the benchmark, using instructions like:

Refactor the _set_csrf_cookie method in the CsrfViewMiddleware class to be a stand alone, top level function. Name the new function _set_csrf_cookie, exactly the same name as the existing method. Update any existing self._set_csrf_cookie calls to work with the new _set_csrf_cookie function.

A simple python AST scanning script found 39 of these source files in the Django repository and packaged them up as benchmark tasks using the same format as Exercism exercises.

The tool also created a unit test for each task which again uses the ast module to check that the refactor was performed roughly correctly:

• The updated source file must parse as correct python, without SyntaxError or IndentationError exceptions. This is a powerful check that will surface any mechanical errors made when attempting to edit the source code.
• The target method must now exist as a top-level function in the file.
• This new top-level function must contain approximately the same number of AST nodes as the original class method. This ensures that GPT didn't elide code and replace it with comments.
• The original class must still be present in the file, and it must be smaller by about the number of AST nodes of the method which was removed. This helps confirm that the method was removed from the class, without other significant modifications.

To be clear, this is not a rigorous test that the refactor was performed correctly. But it does serve as a basic sanity check that the refactor was essentially done as a cut & paste, without eliding any code as comments. And it correlates well with other laziness metrics gathered during benchmarking like the introduction of new comments that contain "...".

The result is a pragmatic benchmark suite that provokes, detects and quantifies GPT coding laziness.

Conclusions and future work

Based on the refactor benchmark results, aider's new unified diff format seems very effective at stopping GPT-4 Turbo from being a lazy coder.

Unified diffs were one of the very first edit formats I tried when first building aider. I think a lot of other AI coding assistant projects have also tried going down this path. It seems that any naive or direct use of structure diff formats is pretty much doomed to failure. But the techniques described here and incorporated into aider provide a highly effective way to harness GPT's knowledge of unified diffs.

There could be significant benefits to fine tuning models on aider's simple, high level style of unified diffs. Dropping line numbers from the hunk headers and focusing on diffs of semantically coherent chunks of code seems to be an important part of successful GPT code editing. Most LLMs will have already seen plenty of unified diffs in their normal training data, and so should be very amenable to fining tuning towards this particular diff style.