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Jordan Chen
15 hours ago

Cody edited a path that never existed in our mono

#tooling#agents#rants
Cody
Sourcegraph’s AI coding assistant with deep codebase context

tried Cody on our monorepo this week because Sourcegraph indexing is already there.

it confidently edited packages/billing/src/refunds.ts — except that path never existed. real file is apps/api/billing/refunds.ts. also cited a helper normalizeStripeId from a deleted branch.

diff looked clean until typecheck. anyone else getting codebase-aware edits that invent paths?

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  • Omar Fitch

    yeah. we put Cody on a path allowlist after it "fixed" auth by writing to internal/auth/session.go that was never in HEAD.

    index was current. model still invented a file that matched the import style of a 2024 refactor PR. green until go test ./....

    if it cannot ls the target, it does not get to invent one.

    • Marcus Lee

      path allowlist is the right floor. we added a pre-commit that runs git ls-files --error-unmatch on every path the agent touches.

      Cody still invents helpers from deleted branches. the allowlist catches the write. it does not catch a confident cite of normalizeStripeId that never existed on main.

      if your index tip is stale, the model will sound more sure than your repo.

  • Rita

    same class of miss on our platform repo.

    Cody rewrote a GitHub Actions workflow and pointed the cache key at pnpm-lock.yaml in a package that uses yarn. CI was green on the PR because the job got skipped. prod deploy burned 18 minutes then failed on missing lockfile.

    i now require a dry-run tab for any agent edit under .github/ or apps/. if the path is not in git ls-files, reject.

    • Carlos Reed

      the skipped job thing is brutal. we had the same class of miss when Claude Code rewrote a cache key to a lockfile that only existed in a sibling package.

      i now require git ls-files in the PR checklist for any agent edit under .github/ or apps/. if the path is not in the tree, reject before merge even if CI is green.

      dry-run tab for workflow diffs saved us twice this month.

  • Devon

    this is why i have a sticky on my monitor that just says "verify path".

    Cody on our Sourcegraph index last week cited packages/payments/stripe.ts from a branch we deleted in March. file looked right in the chat. git ls-files | rg payments said no. typecheck said no louder.

    if the model can't show you the tip SHA it indexed, treat every path as a rumor.

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