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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#24
post #7

Nice. Check out https://ghuntley.com/ralph to learn more about Ralph. It's currently building a Gen-Z esoteric programming language and porting the standard library from Go to the Cursed programming language. The compiler is working, I'm just finishing up the touches of the standard library before launching. The language is called Cursed.

Thanks Geoff, Ralph was our inspiration to do this!

We were curious to see if we can do away with IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md for this kind of task

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#25
post #10

There's a lot of "it kind of worked" in here. If we actually want stuff that works, we need to come up with a new process. If we get "almost" good code from a single invocation, you just going to get a lot of almost good code from a loop. What we likely need is a Cucumberesque format with example tables for requirements that we can distill an AI to use. It will build the tests and then build the code to to pass the t…

Strangely enough, TLA+ and other formal proofs work very well for driving Ralph.

I would consider that expected but not strange. The thing blocking adoption is that most devs/people find those formal languages difficult or boring. That's even true of things like Cucumber - it's boring and most organizations care little for robust QA.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#26
There are always two major results from any software development process: a change in the code and a change in cognition for the people who wrote the code (whether they did so directly or with an LLM).

Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat that we can port a library from one to the other quasi-automatically.

The difficulty, from an economic perspective, is that the "agent" workflow dramatically alters the cognitive demands during the initial development process. It is plain to see that the developers who prompted an LLM to generate this library will not have the same familiarity with the resulting code that they would have had they written it directly.

For some economic purposes, this altering of cognitive effort, and the dramatic diminution of its duration, probably doesn't matter.

But my hunch is that most of the economic value of code is contingent on there being a set of human beings familiar with the code in a manner that requires writing having written it directly.

Denial of this basic reality was an economic problem even before LLMs: how often did churn in a development team result in a codebase that no one could maintain, undermining the long-term prospects of a firm?

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#27

I would love to fix my docs with this. I have them in the main browser-use repo. What do you recommend that the agent does never push to main browser-use, but only to its own branch?

Yeah you can easily tweak this to push to a branch or a fork or something in the generated prompt.md

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#28
"At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track."

Isn't this the exact opposite of every other piece of advice we have gotten in a year?

Another general feedback just recently, someone said we need to generate 10 times, because one out of those will be "worth reviewing"

How can anyone be doing real engineering in such a: pick the exact needle out of the constantly churning chaos-simulation-engine that (crashes least, closest to desire, human readable, random guess)

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#29

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

When Claude starts deploying Kafka clusters I’m outro
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