[flagged]
Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. People don't like medium, rightly so. 2. The content is lower quality.
I find it hard to agree with the point that the content quality is low. Of course, that design does have some issues. But it is still valuable and worth reading. The strengths are that the design forces Chain of Thought as a memory buffer and the TODO list in an FSM style. I think those are fine. The recovery strategy is also pretty good. However, the problem is that the business logic does not run as Python code but…
The recovery strategy in my mind would be what to do in case of a crash, which would just wipe out all the context here (scratch pad, todo list, etc) - it doesn't seem very recoverable.
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it hard to agree with the point that the content quality is low. Of course, that design does have some issues. But it is still valuable and worth reading. The strengths are that the design forces Chain of Thought as a memory buffer and the TODO list in an FSM style. I think those are fine. The recovery strategy is also pretty good. However, the problem is that the business logic does not run as Python code but…
The recovery strategy in my mind would be what to do in case of a crash, which would just wipe out all the context here (scratch pad, todo list, etc) - it doesn't seem very recoverable.
This is the difficult part of programming debates. What you mentioned is about the TODO list disappearing immediately when Python shuts down, right? What I was talking about is the point where the LLM retries when something goes wrong due to a mistake in the previous task. Actually, that's why I included the sentence 'If I were to do the code properly, I would use a separate storage instead of in memory.' I guess I unintentionally caused some confusion.
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#24[flagged]
That seems pretty harsh. How do new frontend frameworks, GPU shaders or another article about how great Rust is (which it is) help fight climate change or child starvation?
Since the migration from setuptools -> poetry -> uv -> full Rust, I think my computer burns up less energy (not to mention all the CI/CD pipelines) from running slow tools over and over. So that's a win for Rust there.
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#25I've tried most form of planning - from the basic AGENTS.md guide to keeping ./dev/ plan files, todo list tools, sqlite db with both minimal and extensive tracking, etc. None of them have been worth it. A year ago the models needed to be reminded. Today they can follow a plan from text alone. This is my experience from working on a project alone - in teams ... i actually think the same lesson holds in the new AI para…
Please don't take offense to this very dumb question:
Why can't you do the planning ? Figure out what needs to be done , break it down into small tasks and then ask the agent to execute those small tasks?
When we executed projects in the past, this is what I would do as a lead: figure out the overall software architecture and delegate the tasks to developers.
This way I always knew how the system worked and could extend it as needed. I am not in development role anymore but I am trying to understand why we are delegating planning and software architecture to coding agents?
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#26[flagged]
Yes, the world does need more.
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#27Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#28I've tried most form of planning - from the basic AGENTS.md guide to keeping ./dev/ plan files, todo list tools, sqlite db with both minimal and extensive tracking, etc. None of them have been worth it. A year ago the models needed to be reminded. Today they can follow a plan from text alone. This is my experience from working on a project alone - in teams ... i actually think the same lesson holds in the new AI para…
Please don't take offense to this very dumb question: Why can't you do the planning ? Figure out what needs to be done , break it down into small tasks and then ask the agent to execute those small tasks? When we executed projects in the past, this is what I would do as a lead: figure out the overall software architecture and delegate the tasks to developers. This way I always knew how the system worked and could ext…
whatever you delegated in the past probably also required planning by the engineer that went down and got it done, most planning done by agents is at this same level, agent explores the codebase, understands where to touch, tradeoffs, code-level architecture, and ask the user for more context or balance with assumptions and other patterns already present in code
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems pretty harsh. How do new frontend frameworks, GPU shaders or another article about how great Rust is (which it is) help fight climate change or child starvation?
> great Rust is (which it is) They just took undefined behaviour and called it unsafe. Theyve not really solved anything. Even their own std lib has security bugs in unsafe code. And their only ever retort is "there are thousands of these bugs a day in c code"... Let's wait until rust gets used seriously in the systems and embedded space first, no point comparing c to minnows like rust when it comes to total cves.
Security and safety are two different things.
Re: Build a Basic AI Agent from Scratch: Long Task Planning
#30I've tried most form of planning - from the basic AGENTS.md guide to keeping ./dev/ plan files, todo list tools, sqlite db with both minimal and extensive tracking, etc. None of them have been worth it. A year ago the models needed to be reminded. Today they can follow a plan from text alone. This is my experience from working on a project alone - in teams ... i actually think the same lesson holds in the new AI para…
Please don't take offense to this very dumb question: Why can't you do the planning ? Figure out what needs to be done , break it down into small tasks and then ask the agent to execute those small tasks? When we executed projects in the past, this is what I would do as a lead: figure out the overall software architecture and delegate the tasks to developers. This way I always knew how the system worked and could ext…
The kinds of detailed (and excellent) plans Opus or Fable can generate on our large code base would take me maybe 1-2 days to work through and they do in 10-20 minutes.
Maybe I spent 2-4 hours reviewing it, checking things with colleagues etc.
Then I press "go" and maybe an hour later I have a tested system ready for manual review.
It's plans are at least as good as any I've seen. Their weakness is if there are unstated assumptions I have about how things need to be done, so most of my time is now getting those assumptions stated properly and then reviewing.
Why wouldn't I use this? It's the best tool I've used in my 30 years of professional programming.