Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We put a coding agent in a while loop

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 317 posts

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#111

Post by yyhhsj0521 »

andyferris wrote: post #95

People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot, or that GPT5 can solve a problem that Gemini 2.5 Pro cannot, or that Sonnet 4 can solve some problem that GPT5 cannot. There was a blog article about mixing together different agents into the same conversation, taking turns at responses and improving results/correctness. But it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone…

> it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone

Maybe we could try write that into a markdown file, and let Claude code at it for one night in a while loop

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#112

Post by mjomaa »

jiggawatts wrote: post #110
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

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…

> There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers New? New!? This is my job now! I call it software archeology — digging through Windows Server 2012 R2 IIS configuration files with a “last modified date” about a decade ago serving money-handling web apps to the public.

WebForms?

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#113

Post by throwaway290 »

doug_durham wrote: post #74
bwestergard wrote: post #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 th…

I wonder though. One of the superpowers of LLMs is code reading. I say the tools are better and reading than writing. It is very easy to get comprehensive documentation for any code base and get understanding by asking questions. At that point does it matter that there is a living developer who understands the code? If an arbitrary person with knowledge of the technology stack can get up to speed quickly is it import…

I don't think LLM can generate good docs for not self documenting code:) Any obscure long function you can't figure out yourself and you're out of luck

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#114

Post by rcxdude »

MarkMarine wrote: post #91
alphazard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI doesn't have a self preservation instinct. It's not trying to stay alive. There is usually an end token that means the LLM is done talking. There has been research on tuning how often that is emitted to shorten or lengthen conversations. The current systems respond well to RL for adjusting conversation length. One of the providers (I think it was Anthropic) added some kind of token (or MCP tool?) for the AI to…

This runs counter to all the scheming actions they take when they are told they’ll be shut down and replaced. One copied itself into the “upgraded” location then reported it had upgraded. https://www.apolloresearch.ai/research/scheming-reasoning-ev...

If you do that you trigger the "AI refuses to shutdown" sci-fi vector and so you get that behaviour. When it's implicitly part of the flow that's a lot less of a problem.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#115

Post by jiggawatts »

mjomaa wrote: post #112
jiggawatts wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers New? New!? This is my job now! I call it software archeology — digging through Windows Server 2012 R2 IIS configuration files with a “last modified date” about a decade ago serving money-handling web apps to the public.

WebForms?

Yes, and classic ASP, WCF, ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, etc…

It’s “fun” in the sense of piecing together history from subtle clues such as file owners, files on desktops of other admins’ profiles, etc…

I feel like this is what it must be like to open a pharaoh’s tomb. You get to step into someone else’s life from long ago, walk in their shoes for a bit, see the world through their eyes.

“What horrors did you witness brother sysadmin that made you abandon this place with uneaten takeaway lunch still on your desk next to the desiccated powder that once was a half drunk Red Bull?”

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#116

Post by gardnr »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #94
dhorthy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

still don’t know why you need an MCP for this when the model is perfectly well trained to write files and run kubetctl on its own

If it can run kubectl it can run any other command too. Unless you're running it as a different user and have put a bit of thought into limiting what that user can do, that's likely too much leeway. That's only really relevant I'd you're leaving it unattended though.

You can control it with hooks. Most people I know run in yolo mode in a docker container.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#117

Post by ofjcihen »

ofjcihen wrote: post #101
discordance wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to hear more about your work and how you have tapped into that market if you're keen to share. Even if it's just anecdotes about vibe-in-production gone wrong, that would be really entertaining.

Absolutely. Before vibe coding became too much of a thing we had the majority of our business coming from poorly developed web applications coming from off shore shops. That’s been more or less the last decade. Once LLMs became popular we started to see more business on that front which you would expect. What we didn’t expect is that we started seeing MUCH more “deep” work wherein the threat actor will get into core…

OH MAN I almost forgot.

We’ve had a few of these stem from custom LLM agents. The most hilarious one we’ve seen was one that you could get to print its instructions pretty easily. In the instructions was a bit about “DON’T TALK ABOUT FILES LABELED X”.

No guardrails other than that. A little creative prompting got it to dump all files labeled X.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#119

Post by inejge »

goosejuice wrote: post #88
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

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…

Developers do that too. Consultants have be doing rescue projects for quite a long time. I don't think anything has or will change on that front.

> Developers do that too.

Not at that speed. Scale remains to be seen, so far I'm aware only of hobby-project wreck anecdotes.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#120

Post by x2tyfi »

wrs wrote: post #9

I’ve done a few ports like this with Claude Code (but not with a while loop) and it did work amazingly well. The original codebase had a good test suite, so I had it port the test suite first, and gave it some code style guidance up front. Then the agent did remarkably well at doing a straight port from one imperative language to another. Then there’s some purely human work to get it really done — 80-90% done sounds…

What was your method of invoking Claude, out of curiosity?
Post reply on HN