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Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

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Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#71

Post by splatzone »

quasiuna wrote: post #60

I've been experimenting with something in a similar space with JavaScript called "Paint AI" https://paintai.groupmind.co.uk Here I've created a basic Paint program with no pens, brushes or other drawing tools. Instead you get the AI to create the painting tools for you and it writes, tests and deploys the JavaScript for you live, usually within 30 seconds. It only uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo model too which is fast a…

It works for me in Chrome, but in Firefox when I click the create button it just refreshes the page

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#72

Post by abecedarius »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #49
bob1029 wrote: post #30

I built a few multi agent systems and went down a rabbit hole where I reached an important conclusion - From the perspective of the LLM, the prompt/context is the only thing that ever matters. Everything about how your agent will behave ultimately boils down to this. I had a bunch of fancy stuff like agents collaborating by passing messages and interpreting them with their own prompts and function calls. Then I reali…

The best analogy I can think of is that if you want your agent to accomplish something without persisting a long chat history, but instead use the agent to reorganize and change the prompt, you would choose to use the method Leonard uses in the film "Memento". Due to his condition, Leonard cannot form new memories and struggles to recall events that occur after his injury. Leonard knows his condition and uses tattoos…

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_the_Mist

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#73

Post by quasiuna »

splatzone wrote: post #71
quasiuna wrote: post #60

I've been experimenting with something in a similar space with JavaScript called "Paint AI" https://paintai.groupmind.co.uk Here I've created a basic Paint program with no pens, brushes or other drawing tools. Instead you get the AI to create the painting tools for you and it writes, tests and deploys the JavaScript for you live, usually within 30 seconds. It only uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo model too which is fast a…

It works for me in Chrome, but in Firefox when I click the create button it just refreshes the page

Ouch - thanks for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#75

Post by jamilton »

regularfry wrote: post #56
bob1029 wrote: post #30

I built a few multi agent systems and went down a rabbit hole where I reached an important conclusion - From the perspective of the LLM, the prompt/context is the only thing that ever matters. Everything about how your agent will behave ultimately boils down to this. I had a bunch of fancy stuff like agents collaborating by passing messages and interpreting them with their own prompts and function calls. Then I reali…

That's true if you're passing messages between identical models. There's a question to ask as to whether different models trained for different tasks would be better than single, multipurpose models though. My gut feel is that eventually multipurpose models will win because you don't have the embedded cost of relearning what syntactic structure is , but for a given training time and number of weights it's not clear w…

Could be the same base multipurpose models, but finetuned to be somewhat specialized.

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#76

Post by [deleted] »

regularfry wrote: post #56
bob1029 wrote: post #30

I built a few multi agent systems and went down a rabbit hole where I reached an important conclusion - From the perspective of the LLM, the prompt/context is the only thing that ever matters. Everything about how your agent will behave ultimately boils down to this. I had a bunch of fancy stuff like agents collaborating by passing messages and interpreting them with their own prompts and function calls. Then I reali…

That's true if you're passing messages between identical models. There's a question to ask as to whether different models trained for different tasks would be better than single, multipurpose models though. My gut feel is that eventually multipurpose models will win because you don't have the embedded cost of relearning what syntactic structure is , but for a given training time and number of weights it's not clear w…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#77

Post by joenot443 »

quasiuna wrote: post #60

I've been experimenting with something in a similar space with JavaScript called "Paint AI" https://paintai.groupmind.co.uk Here I've created a basic Paint program with no pens, brushes or other drawing tools. Instead you get the AI to create the painting tools for you and it writes, tests and deploys the JavaScript for you live, usually within 30 seconds. It only uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo model too which is fast a…

Very cool! I tried three:

My brush should...

- behave like a spray can

- paint randomly like a fire hose

- draw dog faces

The first two worked great, third one less so :) What a fun idea, I love it.

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#78

Post by ianand »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #49
bob1029 wrote: post #30

I built a few multi agent systems and went down a rabbit hole where I reached an important conclusion - From the perspective of the LLM, the prompt/context is the only thing that ever matters. Everything about how your agent will behave ultimately boils down to this. I had a bunch of fancy stuff like agents collaborating by passing messages and interpreting them with their own prompts and function calls. Then I reali…

The best analogy I can think of is that if you want your agent to accomplish something without persisting a long chat history, but instead use the agent to reorganize and change the prompt, you would choose to use the method Leonard uses in the film "Memento". Due to his condition, Leonard cannot form new memories and struggles to recall events that occur after his injury. Leonard knows his condition and uses tattoos…

Andrew Mayne (ex-OpenAI prompt engineer) actually uses Memento as a great metaphor for describing LLMs https://x.com/ianand/status/1723976526436417546?s=46&t=x6aIM...

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#79

Post by tbrockman »

nerdponx wrote: post #63
WiSaGaN wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best analogy I can think of is that if you want your agent to accomplish something without persisting a long chat history, but instead use the agent to reorganize and change the prompt, you would choose to use the method Leonard uses in the film "Memento". Due to his condition, Leonard cannot form new memories and struggles to recall events that occur after his injury. Leonard knows his condition and uses tattoos…

Yeah but there's a plot twist wherein it's revealed that the method has some severe flaws, and it's not as effective as Leonard thinks it is.

Which so satisfyingly parallels prompt injection attacks.

Re: Show HN: Microagents: Agents capable of self-editing their prompts / Python code

#80

Post by withinboredom »

anonzzzies wrote: post #12
withinboredom wrote: post #8

Death by semantic error. An AI tried to tell me the {} opens a new block scope in PHP and any variables in it are scoped to that block. I nearly lol’d and the code it gave me was so wrong it was cringey. Hopefully it is better at Python.

Google and many people will tell you the same thing. So you must have a lot of lol moments in a day. Gpt4 is quite good (better than most humans I ever met) at php, but bad at facts; don’t ask it facts, ask it to write code. That’s what you would ask a human (outside interviews). Disclaimer; I am formally trained with proofs and proof assistants and I hate the current timeline where we ask ai to drivel up code, but I…

> So you must have a lot of lol moments in a day.

I do! I use code generation for non-work-related things, then spend time refactoring it and cleaning up the mess.

AI is pretty decent but lacks the ability to write "maintainable" software, which is easy to extend, and replace. It works as a fantastic starting point in that it fills in all the boilerplate code.

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