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How I program with agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with agents

#41

Post by voidUpdate »

BeetleB wrote: post #33
voidUpdate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people enjoy going to the gym? Those weights have already been lifted a thousand times. I enjoy writing code because of the satisfaction that comes from solving a problem, from being able to create a working thing out of my own head, and to hopefully see myself getting better at programming. I could augment my programming abilities with an LLM in the same way you could augment your gym experience with a forkli…

OK. Be honest. If you had to write an argument parser once a week, would you enjoy it? Or extracting input from a config file? Or setting up a logger?

Complex argument parsing is something that I'd only generally be doing in python, which is handled by the argparse library. If I was doing it in another language, I'd google if there was a library for it, otherwise write it once and then copy it to use in other projects. Same with loggers.

Depends on how I'm extracting input from a config file, what kind of config file, etc. One of my favourite things to do in programming is parsing file formats I'm not familiar with, especially in a white-box situation. I did some NASA files without looking up docs, and that was great fun. I had to use the documentation for doom WAD files, shapefiles and SVGs though. I've requested that my work give me more of those kinds of jobs if possible, since I enjoy them so much

Re: How I program with agents

#42

Post by throwawayscrapd »

osigurdson wrote: post #35
throwawayscrapd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider refactoring the code so that you don't have to do shotgun surgery every time you make this kind of change?

You mean to future proof the code so requirements changes are easy to implement? Yeah, I've seen lots of code like that (some of it written by myself). Usually the envisioned future never materializes unfortunately.

I mean given that you've had this problem repeatedly, I'd call it "past-proofing", but I suppose you know your codebase better than I do.

Re: How I program with agents

#43

Post by closewith »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #32
closewith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent is clear in that it acts on behalf of the user. "LLM feedback loop systems" could be to do with training, customer service, etc. > Agent is like Retina Display to my ears, at least at this stage! Retina is a great name. People know what it means - high quality screens.

>Agent is clear in that it acts on behalf of the user. Yes, but you could say that AI orchestrated workflows are also acting on behalf of the user and the "Agentic AI" people seem to be going to great lengths to distinguish AI Agents from AI Workflows. Really, the only things that distinguish the AI Agent is the "running the LLM in a loop" + the LLM creating structured output.

> Really, the only things that distinguish the AI Agent is the "running the LLM in a loop" + the LLM creating structured output.

Well, that UI is what makes agent such an apt name.

Re: How I program with agents

#45

Post by closewith »

quantumHazer wrote: post #37
closewith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent is clear in that it acts on behalf of the user. "LLM feedback loop systems" could be to do with training, customer service, etc. > Agent is like Retina Display to my ears, at least at this stage! Retina is a great name. People know what it means - high quality screens.

Retina Display means nothing. Just because Apple pushed hard to make it common to everyone it doesn’t mean it’s a good technical name.

> Retina Display means nothing.

It means a high-quality screen and is named after the innermost part of the eye, which evokes focused perception.

> Just because Apple pushed hard to make it common to everyone it doesn’t mean it’s a good technical name.

It's an excellent technical name, just like AI agent. People understand what it means with minimal education and their hunch about that meaning is usually right.

Re: How I program with agents

#46

Post by flir »

bArray wrote: post #9

LLMs for code review, rather than code writing/design could be the killer feature. I think that code review has been broken for a while now, but this could be a way forward. Of particular interest would be security, undefined behaviour, basic misuse of features, double checking warnings out of the compiler against the source code to ensure it isn't something more serious, etc. My current use of LLMs is typically via…

If you do "please review this code" in a loop, you'll eventually find a case where the chatbot starts by changing X to Y, and a bit later changes Y back to X.

It works for code review, but you have to be judicious about which changes you accept and which you reject. If you know enough to know an improvement when you see one, it's pretty great at spitting out candidate changes which you can then accept or reject.

Re: How I program with agents

#47

Post by ep103 »

Okay, so how do I set up the sort of agent / feedback loop he is describing? Can someone point me in the direction to do that?

So far all I've done is just open up the windsurf IDE.

Do I have to set this up from scratch?

Re: How I program with agents

#48

Post by dahart »

quantumHazer wrote: post #37
closewith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent is clear in that it acts on behalf of the user. "LLM feedback loop systems" could be to do with training, customer service, etc. > Agent is like Retina Display to my ears, at least at this stage! Retina is a great name. People know what it means - high quality screens.

Retina Display means nothing. Just because Apple pushed hard to make it common to everyone it doesn’t mean it’s a good technical name.

You’re right that it’s branding, but it also has meaning: a display resolution that (approximately) matches the resolution of the human retina, under typical viewing conditions. The fact that the term is easily understood by the lay public is what makes it a good name and smart branding. BTW the term ‘retinal display’ existed long before Apple used it, and refers to a display that projects directly onto the retina.

Re: How I program with agents

#49

Post by esafak »

zOneLetter wrote: post #7

Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to write your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc. Although asking an LLM to extract and find the thing I'm looking for in an API Doc is super useful and time saving. To me, it's not even about how good these LLMs get in the future. I just don't like reading other people's…

If you give a precise enough spec, it's effectively your code, with the remaining difference being inconsequential. And in my experience, it is often better, drawing from a wider pool of idioms.

Re: How I program with agents

#50

Post by falcor84 »

quantumHazer wrote: post #37
closewith wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agent is clear in that it acts on behalf of the user. "LLM feedback loop systems" could be to do with training, customer service, etc. > Agent is like Retina Display to my ears, at least at this stage! Retina is a great name. People know what it means - high quality screens.

Retina Display means nothing. Just because Apple pushed hard to make it common to everyone it doesn’t mean it’s a good technical name.

You can argue that Apple haven't achieved it, but it has a very clear technical meaning - a sufficiently high dpi such that pixels become imperceptible to the average healthy human eye from a typical viewing distance.
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