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Re:Will LLMs Eclipse the Classic Code Diff Algorithms? by DarkPlayer on Thursday November 09, 2023 @03:45PM (#38211001)
I think LLMs will have a hard time replacing traditional diff algorithms. You want your diff to be reliable and predictable. It shouldn't omit relevant changes. This is not really a strength of LLMs.

I think a system that parses the code and uses verifiable rules to hide invariant changes would have a much easier time being adopted. I may be biased since I work on SemanticDiff (think difftastic but for VS Code and GitHub) and have implemented such rules myself. There have been several times where I've thought about implementing a new rule, only to find out that some obscure edge case would not be handled correctly. So I don't see how LLMs could handle these cases correctly in the near future.

Re:Will LLMs Eclipse the Classic Code Diff Algorithms? by baristaGeek on Thursday November 09, 2023 @04:08PM (#38211336)
Huge fan of SemanticDiff!

We still see this technology being able to handle edge cases (as you mention) such as certain movements of blocks of code to another file.