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Less human AI agents, please

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Re: Less human AI agents, please

#161

Post by paradox460 »

mrbnprck wrote: post #96
ep103 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of why I'm not terribly fond of CLI harnesses, and prefer ones built into editors like zed. They can (but sadly rarely do) access structured information about your codebase, that's more sophisticated than looking for all strings that match

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#162

Post by paradox460 »

QuercusMax wrote: post #109
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've had the agent tell me "this looks like it's going to be a very big change. it could take weeks." - and then I tell it to go ahead and it finishes in 5 minutes because in reality it just needs grep and sed.

Sounds like that agent was trained on slack messages with some of my past coworkers

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#163

Post by paradox460 »

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'.

And if you suppress the stop word, things get funky really fast. Like a Joyce novel

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#164

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #75
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…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#166

Post by zingar »

chrisjj wrote: post #156
Jtarii wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think you could explain all AI behaviour by reading a physics textbook?

Nope. But someone smart enough could.

How the neural networks produce such surprisingly human characteristics is an open question with a ton of research going into it. Explaining this is a bit more than what one smart person can achieve.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#167

Post by zingar »

dabbledash wrote: post #159
zingar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we should just commit the signature change with a TODO I'm fascinated that so many folks report this, I've literally never seen it in daily CC use. I can only guess that my habitually starting a new session and getting it to plan-document before action ("make a file listing all call sites"; "look at refactoring.md and implement") makes it clear when it's time for exploration vs when it's time for action (i.e.…

I wonder if it has to do with how often TODOs appear in the existing code.

What's your hypothesis about the relationship between TODOs and action?

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#168

Post by eleumik »

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…

Usually suggests to use ThreadLocal in java :) when said is last resort, inefficient not easy to do,it agrees then .. I quit

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#169

Post by giannicmptr1000 »

This is very easy to instruct and modify before you start a session. The article explains that don't understand how ai responds in the style you prompt it. Probably your prompts are too human, with no instruction. Very smart people still do not understand how to us ai efficiently.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#170

Post by gloosx »

Jtarii wrote: post #132
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'.

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.

Thoughts are derivative of sensory processing. We have subjective experience and subjective feeling, our symbols are grounded in physical reality. LLM "thoughts" are simulacrum, manipulating symbols according to rules does not imply understanding. One must be quite derealised to think we are predictive machinery or the human brain is just a fuzzier – it is much more than that.
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