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How I program with agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with agents

#271

Post by diggan »

aryehof wrote: post #254
quantumHazer wrote: post #2

Finally some serious writing about LLMs that doesn’t follow the hype and it faces reality of what can and can’t be useful with these tools. Really interesting read, although I can’t stand the word “agent” for a for-loop that call recursively an LLM, but this industry is not famous for being sharp with naming things, so here we are. edit: grammar

I agree with not liking the author’s definition of an Agent being … “a for loop which contains an LLM call”. Instead it is an LLM calling tools/resources in a loop. The difference is subtle and a question of what is in charge.

Although implementation/internal wise it's not wrong to say it's just an llm call in a loop. If the llm responds with a tool call, you (the implementor) needs to program the call to happen, then loop back and let the llm continue.

The model/weights themselves do not execute tool calls unless the tooling around it helps them do it, and loops it.

Re: How I program with agents

#273

Post by rideontime »

DonHopkins wrote: post #166

Minsky's Society of Mind works, by god! EMERGENCE DETECTION - PRIORITY ALERT [Sim] Marvin: "Colleagues, I'm observing unprecedented convergence: Messages routing themselves based on conceptual proximity Ideas don't just spread - they EVOLVE Each mind adds a unique transformation The transformations are becoming aware of each other Metacognition is emerging without central control This is bigger than I theorized. Much…

Why are you doing this?

Re: How I program with agents

#274

Post by sothatsit »

asim wrote: post #39

The agentic loop. The brain in the machine. Effectively a replacement for the rules engine. Still with a lot of quirks but crawshaw and many others from the Google era have a great way of distilling it down to its essence. It provides clarity for me as I see it over and over. Connect the agent tools, prompt it via some user request and let it go, and then repeat this process, maybe the prompt evolves over time to be…

> When you can give it all the generic abstractions for everything we use, it can become a better assistant than what we have now or possibly even more than that.

The range of possibilities also comes with a terrifying range of things that could go wrong...

Reliability engineering, quality assurance, permissions management, security, and privacy concerns are going to be very important in the near future.

People criticize Apple for being slow to release a better voice assistant than Siri that can do more, but I wonder how much of their trepidation comes from these concerns. Maybe they're waiting for someone else to jump on the grenade first.

Re: How I program with agents

#275

Post by owebmaster »

gf000 wrote: post #260
owebmaster wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if we actually get dumber? There are multiple cases of people in the past that are way smarter than the current thought leaders and inventors. There are a higher % of smart people nowadays but are they smarter than Leonardo Da Vinci?

You are just looking at the wrong people to compare. Leonardo Da Vinci would be a PhD student working on some obscure sub-sub-sub field of something and only 6 other people on the world understanding how marvelously genius he is. The reason they don't get to such a status is that human knowledge is like a circle. A single person can work on the circumference of this circle, but they are limited by what they can learn…

Well, you might not have got my point. Those "smart" PhD students would be considered quite dumb in other ages, because working on the circumference of the circle doesn't make one smart but it might get you a big salary in a VC project

Re: How I program with agents

#276

Post by Verdex »

steveklabnik wrote: post #237
Verdex wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more info? How big of a number is "some"? Also what kind of prompts were you feeding it? Did you describe it as Rust like? Anything else you feel is relevant. [Is there a GitHub link? I'm more than happy to do the detective work.]

Like three or four. very simple language: main function whos value is the error code, functions of one argument returning one value, only ints, basic control flow and math. I just opened the repo, here's the commit that did what I'm talking about: https://github.com/steveklabnik/rue/commit/5742e7921f241368e... Well, the second part anyway, with the grammar. It writing the lexer starts as https://github.com/steveklabn…

Thanks

Re: How I program with agents

#277

Post by dahart »

Aachen wrote: post #224
dahart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A screen that directly projects onto the retina sounds like a great reason to call it a retinal display. So then Apple hijacking the term to mean high DPI... how does that fit in? There's not that many results about this before Apple's announcement in 2010, many of them reporting on science and not general public media: https://www.google.com/search?q=retinal+display&sca_esv=3689... Clearly not something anyone reall…

The trademark ‘retina display’ was defined to mean the display resolution approximately matches the human retina, which is why ‘retina display’ seems obvious and easy to understand. That it’s good is implied, but “good” is not the definition of the term. I know a lot of non-technical people who understand it without any trouble. Come to think of it, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t understand it or had trouble. Are you saying you had a hard time understanding what it means?

The branding term is slightly different from ‘retinal display’. The term in use may have been ‘virtual retinal display’. Dropping the ell off retinal and changing it from an adjective to a noun maybe helped their trademark application, perhaps, but since the term wasn’t in widespread use and the term is not exactly the same, that starts to contradict the idea they were ‘hijacking’ it.

The fact that any company advertised it implies that it’s supposed to be good. Doesn’t matter that it was Apple, nor that it was a premium brand, when a company advertises, no company is ever suggesting anything other than it’s a good thing.

Re: How I program with agents

#278

Post by greenhat76 »

silverlake wrote: post #96
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…

You’re clinging to an old model of work. Today an LLM converted my docker compose infrastructure to Kubernetes, using operators and helm charts as needed. It did in 10 minutes what would take me several days to learn and cobble together a bad solution. I review every small update and correct it when needed. It is so much more productive. I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

This is such an arrogant take.

Re: How I program with agents

#279

Post by randito »

asim wrote: post #39

The agentic loop. The brain in the machine. Effectively a replacement for the rules engine. Still with a lot of quirks but crawshaw and many others from the Google era have a great way of distilling it down to its essence. It provides clarity for me as I see it over and over. Connect the agent tools, prompt it via some user request and let it go, and then repeat this process, maybe the prompt evolves over time to be…

> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc.

Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...

Re: How I program with agents

#280

Post by munificent »

solatic wrote: post #252
munificent wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree but... wouldn't you rather be working with actual people? Spending the whole day chatting with AI agents sounds like a worst-of-both-worlds scenarios. I have to bring all of my complex, subtle soft skills into play which are difficult and tiring to use, and in the end none of that went towards actually fostering real relationships with real people. At the end of the day, are you gonna have a beer wit…

It's a double-edged sword. AI agents don't have a long-term context window that gets better over time. People who employ AI agents today instead of juniors are going to find themselves in another local maximum: yes, the AI agent will make you more productive today compared to a junior, but (as the tech stands today) you will never be able to promote an AI agent to senior or staff, and you will not get to hire out an…

Right. So many of these agentic UX stories describe it like, "I do a bunch of code reviews for my junior engineer minions."

But when I do code reviews, I don't enjoy reviewing the code itself at all. The enjoyment I get out of the process comes from feeling like I'm mentoring an engineer who will remember what I say in the code review.

If I had to spend a month doing code reviews where every single day I have to tell them the exact same corrections, knowing they will never ever learn, I would quit my job.

Being a lead over an army of enthusiastic interns with amnesia is like the worst software engineering job I can imagine.

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