We built https://aflock.ai/ (open source) to help with this. Constraining activity tends to work well
Agents need control flow, not more prompts
111–120 of 348 posts
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1121000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
> This started breaking down after ~30 files.
Codex's short context and todolist system combined somehow helps here though. Because of the frequent compact. The model was forced to recheck what todo list item has not done yet and what workflow skill it has to use. I used to left it for multi hour to do a big clean up and it finished without obvious issues.
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree. Like all stochastic processes, LLM errors can be quantified. That makes each use case a risk-reward tradeoff where users can decide if the tradeoff makes sense for them or not. There are scenarios where errors are acceptable because the risks are low or errors are acceptable or the rewards make up for them. This is a process engineer problem where business and technology specifics matter.
I see where you're coming from, but this assumes good behavior and discipline which most people/teams struggle with. If a business can get away with some margin of error being acceptable, more power to them. But if not (or doing so would cause additional problems; what I'd imagine to be true for a non-trivial number of orgs), it's wise to consider the nature of the tool a lot of people are suggesting is mandatory if…
That's fair. A heuristic that leaves some opportunity on the table due to org capability is a reasonable one to have.
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1141000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
I’m working on a hybrid system of old school task graph and ai agents and let them instantiate each other. I think others will do that eventually.
Jira for agents?
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#115I wonder if a part of the problem isn't just the misapplication of LLMs in the first place. As has been mentioned elsewhere, perhaps the agent's prompt should be to write code to accomplish as much of the task in as repeatable/verifiable/deterministic a way as possible. This would hopefully include validation of the agent's output as well. The overall goal would be to keep the LLM out of doing processing that could b…
Completely agree! People tend to forget we are non deterministic too! Yet we are able to write code fine, and fairly reliably by using tools that can help keep us fairly honest. I think most problems with ai tend to be around can you deterministically test the thing you are asking it to do? How many of us would never ever show work, without going to check the thing we just built first?
> can you deterministically test the thing you are asking it to do?
Of course: have it write tests first; and run them to check its work.
Works well for refactoring, but greenfield implementations still rely on a spec that is guaranteed to be incomplete, overcomplete and wrong in many ways.
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1161000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
I used to assume they pushed people into the prompt-only workflows because you’re paying them for the tokens, and not paying them for the scaffolding you built. However, I think that they’re really worried about is that a person needs to design and implement that stuff… It throws a wet blanket on their insistence that this will replace entire people in entire workflows or even projects, and I just don’t buy it. I do…
Aren't they just buying time to build you whatever harness you need? They want to be the only software engineering shop in the world.
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#117[deleted]
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1181000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
Can you not have it write your harness for you, or have it be the first step? You can push your own determinism where you need, surely.
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1191000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
> This started breaking down after ~30 files. Codex's short context and todolist system combined somehow helps here though. Because of the frequent compact. The model was forced to recheck what todo list item has not done yet and what workflow skill it has to use. I used to left it for multi hour to do a big clean up and it finished without obvious issues.
Is Codex willing to do "multi hour" tasks when used with a ChatGPT Plus subscription, or does it need something more expensive like Pro?
Re: Agents need control flow, not more prompts
#1201000% agree. I am increasingly hesitant to believe Anthropic's continual war drum of "build for the capabilities of future models, they'll get better". We've got a QA agent that needs to run through, say, 200 markdown files of requirements in a browser session. Its a cool system that has really helped improve our team's efficiency. For the longest time we tried everything to get a prompt like the following working: "…
You could have a skill that is the combination of a minimal markdown file and a set of orchestration scripts that do the deterministic work. The agent does not have to “run everything”, it just needs to know how to launch the right script.