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Eight more months of agents

crawshaw.io

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Re: Eight more months of agents

#151

Post by arrrg »

entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before).

I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything.

Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewhere in terms of relatively low value things nobody built before because it just wasn’t worth the time investment – but those things are necessarily relatively low value (or else it would have been worth it to build it) and as such also relatively limited.

Software has amazing economies of scale. So I don’t think the builder/tool analogy works at all. The economics don’t map. Since you only have to build software once and then it doesn’t matter how often you use it (yeah, a simplification) even pretty low value things have always been worth building. In other words: there is tons of software out there. That’s not the issue. The issue is: what it the right software and can it solve my problems?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#152

Post by RGamma »

dirkc wrote: post #6

> Using anything other than the frontier models is actively harmful If that is true, why should one invest in learning now rather than waiting for 8 months to learn whatever is the frontier model then?

There's not that much learning involved. Modern SOTA models are much more intelligent than what they used to be not long ago. It's quite scary/amazing.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#153

Post by jFriedensreich »

Its funny how many variations of meaning people assign to agent related terms. Conflating agent with cli and as opposite spectrum of ide is a new one i did not encounter before. I run agents with vscode-server also in a vm and would not give up the ability to have a proper gui anytime i feel like and also being able to switch seamless between more autonomous operation and more interactive seems useful at any level.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#154

Post by mono442 »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67
illusive4080 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl... There’s a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the tools.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

Using these tools comes down to basically just writing what you want in a natural language. I don't think it will be a problem to catch up if they need to.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#155

Post by Schlagbohrer »

palata wrote: post #131
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.

> In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers. What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary? What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired. I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a societ…

(Imagine me posting the graph of worker productivity in the US climbing quickly over time while pay remains flat or falls)

Re: Eight more months of agents

#156

Post by gjulianm »

mattmanser wrote: post #122
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #117

Local models are decent now. Qwen3 coder is pretty good and decent speed. I use smaller models (qwen2.5:1.5b) with keyboard shortcuts and speech to text to ask for man page entries, and get 'em back faster than my internet connection and a "robust" frontier model does. And web search/RAG hides a multitude of sins. "Using anything other than the frontier models is actively harmful" - so how come I'm getting solid resu…

Have you used the frontier models recently? It's hard to communicate the difference the last 6 months has seen. We're at the point where copilot is irrelevant. Your way of working is irrelevant. Because that's not how you interact with coding AIs anymore, you're chatting with them about the code outside the IDE.

Honestly, I've been using the frontier models and I'm not sure where people are seeing these massive improvements. It's not that they're bad, it's just that I don't see that much of an improvement the last 6 months. They're so inconsistent that it's hard to have a clear idea of what's happening. I usually switch between models and I don't see either those massive differences either. Not to mention that sometimes models regress in certain aspects (e.g., I've seen later models that tend to "think" more and end up at the same result but taking far more time and tokens).

Re: Eight more months of agents

#157

Post by korallus »

baq wrote: post #99
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter how fast you run if it’s not the correct direction.

Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line

Then where is all this new and amazing software? If LLM can 10x or 100x someones output we should've seen an explosion of great software by now.

One dude with an LLM should be able to write a browser fully capable of browsing the modern web or an OS from scratch in a year, right?

Re: Eight more months of agents

#158

Post by pferde »

dude250711 wrote: post #143
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #106

> Pay through the nose for Opus or GPT-7.9-xhigh-with-cheese. Don't worry, it's only for a few years. > You have to turn off the sandbox, which means you have to provide your own sandbox. I have tried just about everything and I highly recommend: use a fresh VM. > I am extremely out of touch with anti-LLM arguments 'Just pay out the arse and run models without a sandbox or in some annoying VM just to see them fail. W…

Well, not 'against' per se, just watching LLM-enthusiasts tumble in the mud for now. Though I have heard that if I don't jump into the mud this instance, I will be left behind apparently for some reason. So you either get left behind or get a muddy behind, your choice.

Everybody keeps saying the models are getting better, the tooling is getting better, people are discovering better practices...

So why not just wait out this insane initial phase, and if anything is left standing afterwards and proves itself, just learn that.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#159

Post by kjksf »

pferde wrote: post #158
dude250711 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not 'against' per se, just watching LLM-enthusiasts tumble in the mud for now. Though I have heard that if I don't jump into the mud this instance, I will be left behind apparently for some reason. So you either get left behind or get a muddy behind, your choice.

Everybody keeps saying the models are getting better, the tooling is getting better, people are discovering better practices... So why not just wait out this insane initial phase, and if anything is left standing afterwards and proves itself, just learn that.

Because there's nothing to learn. "learning" to use claude code is less effort than learning how to use the basics of git.

They provide value today so I'm using them today.

Re: Eight more months of agents

#160

Post by c048 »

arrrg wrote: post #151
entropyneur wrote: post #124

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws. Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

To me the hard problem isn’t building things, it’s knowing what to build (finding the things that provide value) and how to build it (e.g. finding novel approaches to doing something that makes something possible that wasn’t possible before). I don’t see AI helping with knowing what to build at all and I also don’t see AI finding novel approaches to anything. Sure, I do think there is some unrealized potential somewh…

I wonder what happened to the old addage of "only 10% of the time you actually spend coding, the rest of the time is figuring out what is needed".

At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work that needed to be done.

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