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How and where will agents ship software?

instantdb.com

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Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#21

Post by jamest »

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code.

The experience was brilliant.

Pros:

+ Fast

+ Easy

+ "Vibe coding on steroids" basically

+ The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech

Cons:

- It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seemed reasonable, but if I were doing a prod system vs a PoC, this is where the time would be spent. ("Vibe coding lets you create tech debt 10x faster")

Net-net: This is the way for prototyping / validating. This is probably the way for production systems in N months too once the toolchain + agents get better.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#22

Post by TeMPOraL »

mhog_hn wrote: post #17
air7 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but who will buy the advertised products? and with what money?

Agents with their agent money - get ready for new legal structures and a bifurcation of the economy: agentic and human. Who knows…

A separate, self-contained economy.

A Disneyland with no children.

Moloch.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#23

Post by croes »

jamest wrote: post #21

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code. The experience was brilliant. Pros: + Fast + Easy + "Vibe coding on steroids" basically + The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech Cons: - It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seem…

If they get better. At the moment the progress is on the toolchains because the LLMs progress as such slows down because of the lack of training data

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#25

Post by stopachka »

arscan wrote: post #14
nezaj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words on the rules/documentation! It was definitely an iterative process to figure out how to get good results. We have an llms.txt and llms-full.txt (~9k lines) which contains all our documentation. Feeding these to the claude didn't get great results, it was just too much information. We manually compressed our llms-full.txt into a rules file (~1.5k lines) which declared the API upfront and p…

> Looking at the kind of mistakes Claude made, it seemed like a human could make those mistakes too (very useful feedback for us to improve our API ). This is something we've found for our API -- just having LLMs attempt to use it helps us identify things that we haven't documented well or placed enough emphasis on (for things that are critical but are non-obvious or may be drowned out by other less important informa…

Yes. Fun fact, Instant got the `create` method because of how many times LLMs hallucinated it.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#27

Post by stopachka »

sails wrote: post #19

> Traditionally, end-users were non-technical and would be stuck with whatever the application developer gave them. But now every user has an LLM too. Interesting point. I keep coming back to the idea that users could request changes, and they could be experimentally deployed immediately.

Thank you. There was a lot to extensions that was bit of scope for the essay, which I would love to go deeper on in later writing.

Some open questions I had as I thought through extensions:

We talked about the data abstraction side: when you expose data, it's easier for end-users to build extensions. But there are questions on UIs and data modeling.

UIs: How cool would it be agents could "enter" into applications and change the UI? In one sense this hard, but at least a demo feels in reach. What if an app exposed the UI components that it was built out of? This would let the agent remix them.

Data modeling: Exposing data works, but what if users want to store extra information? Maybe each user could spin up their own separate "extra" database.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#28

Post by achierius »

jamest wrote: post #21

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code. The experience was brilliant. Pros: + Fast + Easy + "Vibe coding on steroids" basically + The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech Cons: - It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seem…

Would you mind sharing the code, as well as prompts if you're comfortable? I'm trying to sample anecdata to help re-baseline my intuition on these things.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#29

Post by 0x457 »

CartwheelLinux wrote: post #5
lenerdenator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting. puts in retainer; pushes glasses back up bridge of nose Technically schpeaking, what you're talking about is the difference between weak AI and strong AI/artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is the kind of AI that has reached human levels of consciousness. We're not there yet. P…

Haha. You're 100% correct in the AGI/AI thing. I'm just sick and tired of every article being about AI, it's great people but we can't stop innovating and attending to other areas of technology. >You can do a lot with glorified prediction systems that require human prompting >People don't need a machine that wonders the same stuff they do; they need something that does a specific task in lieu of their own effort. Thi…

You're saying it like this is first time AI changes its meaning in marketing. People used to market "smart cycle" in dishwashers as AI.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#30

Post by iwontberude »

dmitrygr wrote: post #8
xnx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, Do you think that the LLM/AI tools today are better than those from 2 years ago? Do you think the LLM/AI tools in 2 years time will be no better than the ones we have today?

False equivalency. Faster and faster stochastic parrots != intelligence.

You actually answered their question by reducing two years of LLM improvements to a factor of speed.

Interpreting your non-response: No, two years have not improved things and two more years will not either.

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