131–140 of 184 posts
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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'.
You aren't aware of how you come up with the words you are saying, you just start talking and the next word somehow falls out of your mouth. Maybe you think before you start talking, but where do the thoughts come from? They just appear to you in your head. We are just as much a predictive machine as LLMs, the human brain is just fuzzier.
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…
> 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.
And an agent can learn to use sg with a skill too. (Or they can use sed)
The issue is, at every point you do a replace, you need to verify if it was the right thing to do or if it was a false positive.
If you are doing this manually, there's the time to craft the sed or sg query, then for each replacement you need to check it. If there are dozens, that's probably okay. If there are hundreds, it's less appealing to check them manually. (Then there's the issue of updating docs, and other things like this)
People use agents because not only they don't want to write the initial sed script, they also don't want to verify at each place if it was correctly applied, and much less update docs. The root of this is laziness, but for decades we have hailed laziness as a virtue in programming.
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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…
Shouldn't the LLM have some tool that gives it AST access, LSP access, and the equiv of sed/grep/awk? It doesn't necessarily need to read every file and do the change "by hand".
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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'.
When someone asks you a question in what ways are you not an "autocomplete"? You aren't aware of how you come up with the words you are saying, you just start talking and the next word somehow falls out of your mouth. Maybe you think before you start talking, but where do the thoughts come from? They just appear to you in your head. We are just as much a predictive machine as LLMs, the human brain is just fuzzier.
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 let it find all instances, write a plan, check it, and execute it.
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When someone asks you a question in what ways are you not an "autocomplete"? You aren't aware of how you come up with the words you are saying, you just start talking and the next word somehow falls out of your mouth. Maybe you think before you start talking, but where do the thoughts come from? They just appear to you in your head. We are just as much a predictive machine as LLMs, the human brain is just fuzzier.
Well, maybe this is how you think but not everyone is a self-admitted NPC. Speak for yourself only please.
> There was only one small issue: it was written in the programming language and with the library it had been told not to use. This was not hidden from it. It had been documented clearly, repeatedly, and in detail. What a human thing to do. "Ignoring" instructions is not human thing. It's a bad LLM thing. Or just LLM thing.
It is a human thing: Don't thin of a pink elephant.