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

Less human AI agents, please

nial.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 184 posts

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#91

Post by winddude »

hausrat wrote: post #30

This has very little to do with someone making the LLM too human but rather a core limitation of the transformer architecture itself. Fundamentally, the model has no notion of what is normal and what is exceptional, its only window into reality is its training data and your added prompt. From the perspective of the model your prompt and its token vector is super small compared to the semantic vectors it has generated…

> This has very little to do with someone making the LLM too human but rather a core limitation of the transformer architecture itself.

It has almost everything to do with it. Models have been fine-tuned to generate outputs that humans prefer.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#92

Post by xeyownt »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #84
zingar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. This is invisible to me, what anthropomorphising did you notice that stood out?

From the first sentence > I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.

What a poor explanation.

With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force.

When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#93

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

gregates wrote: post #15

The version of this I encounter literally every day is: I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a def…

I’m skeptical of most “harness hacking”, but this is a situation that calls for it. You need to establish some higher level context or constraint it’s working against.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#94

Post by pythonaut_16 »

felipeerias wrote: post #51
gregates wrote: post #15

The version of this I encounter literally every day is: I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a def…

Claude 4.7 broke something while we were working on several failing tests and justified itself like this: > That's a behavior narrowing I introduced for simplicity. It isn't covered by the failing tests, so you wouldn't have noticed — but strictly speaking, [functionality] was working before and now isn't. I know that a LLM can not understand its own internal state nor explain its own decisions accurately. And yet, I…

> strictly speaking, it was working before and now it isn't

I've been seeing more things like this lately. It's doing the weird kind of passive deflection that's very funny when in the abstract and very frustrating when it happens to you.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#95

Post by chrisjj »

Animats wrote: post #29
nialse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We should not be anthropomorphising LLMs or having them mimic humans.

It's inherent in the way LLMs are built, from human-written texts, that they mimic humans. They have to. They're not solving problems from first principles.

They ingest text written in first and third person and regurgitate in first person only, right?

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#96

Post by mrbnprck »

ep103 wrote: post #86
pavel_lishin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about half the IDEs I've ever used just had this as a feature. Right-click on function, click on "change signature", wait a few seconds, verify with `git diff`.

yeah, and this has the advantage of both being deterministic, and only updating things that are actually linked as opposed to also accidentally updating naming collisions

Arguably its only a matter of making lsp features available to the coding agent via tool calls (CLI, MCP) to prevent the model start doing such changes "manually" but rather use the deterministic tools.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#97

Post by skydhash »

jxf wrote: post #77
SoftTalker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter I have to ask, is this the sort of thing people use agents/AI for? Because I'd probably reach for sed or awk.

It's not always amenable to grepping. But this is a great use case for AST searches, and is part of the reason that LSP tools should really be better integrated with agents.

Programming language are formal, so unless you’re doing magic stuff (eval and reflection), you can probably grep into a file, eliminate false positive cases, then do a bit of awk or shell scripting with sed. Or use Vim or Emacs tooling.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#98

Post by chrisjj »

xeyownt wrote: post #92
philipwhiuk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first sentence > I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.

What a poor explanation. With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force. When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.

"Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#99

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bob1029 wrote: post #76
gregates wrote: post #15

The version of this I encounter literally every day is: I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a def…

> I found 67 call sites. This is a pretty substantial change. Maybe we should just commit the signature change with a TODO to update all the call sites, what do you think? I think some of this is a problem in the agent's design. I've got a custom harness around GPT5.4 and I don't let my agent do any tool calling on the user's conversation. The root conversation acts as a gatekeeper and fairly reliably pushes crap res…

Ehhhhh, "problem" is a strong word. Sometimes you're throwing out a lot of signal if you don't let the coding agent tell you it thinks your task is a bad idea. I got a PR once attempting to copy half of our production interface because the author successfully convinced Claude his ill-formed requirements had to be achieved no matter what.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#100

Post by unshavedyak »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #83
SoftTalker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter I have to ask, is this the sort of thing people use agents/AI for? Because I'd probably reach for sed or awk.

I think about half the IDEs I've ever used just had this as a feature. Right-click on function, click on "change signature", wait a few seconds, verify with `git diff`.

I actually still like LLMs for this. I use rust LSP (rust analyzer) and it supports this, but LLMs will additionally go through and reword all of the documentation, doc links, comments, var names in other funcs in one go, etc.

Are they perfect? Far from it. But it's more comprehensive. Additionally simple refactors like this are insanely fast to review and so it's really easy to spot a bad change or etc. Plus i'm in Rust so it's typed very heavily.

In a lot of scenarios i'd prefer an AST grep over an LSP rename, but hat also doesn't cover the docs/comments/etc.

Post reply on HN