171–180 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes intuitive sense. Can I ask what harness you're using that allows you to configure the constraint and how?
It's a custom agent loop. There are no other parties involved here. Just vanilla C#/.NET and the OpenAI DLL.
I guess I am mostly enjoying learning the fundamentals of AI stuff, even though I disagree with the direction it is going. But I am struggling to put into words how alarming I find the comments on threads like this — all sorts of good-natured anecdotes about how XYZ works for them that are more like the suggestions in pet care or cookery threads on Facebook. (Or worse still, like any Facebook 3D printing group: anyon…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The arbitrary and non-deterministic nature of LLM workflows gives me full on ick. As an old embedded/systems guy I have always prioritized determinism and repeatability in my workflows. But damn, agents are amazing and I'm enjoying being a "thought process designer". I'm not going back. Even if AI development stops today my career will never be the same.
I felt the same way about the non-determinism but realized it can be really beneficial to have a machine that can fairly reliably turn non-determinism into determinism. I’m working on a tiny agent harness at home to learn and the process of taking human speech and turning it into agent tool calls that output something generally deterministic depending on how the tool is defined is so interesting. One of the big takea…
I've been able to avoid context size issues by applying one simple constraint to my agent loop. What I do is prevent all tool calling in the user's top-level conversation thread. Anything that needs to tool call must happen in a recursive invoke of the agent, which returns whatever results to caller. I can keep the same high level conversation going for an entire day over a million LOC+ codebase without ever hitting…
So what does the top level thread look like? "Make foo() do bar" (Subagent invoked) "Job finished!"
[User] Actual human prompt
[Agent] Attempted use of tool & hand slap
[Agent] call(projection of user's prompt relative to discovered tool constraints)
["User"] Prompt from above call
[Agent] Legal tool use
[Agent] ... until satisfied
[Agent] return(summary that satisfies the prompt for this level of execution)
[Agent] Additional call() invokes possible depending on returned summary
[Agent] Final return(summary) from root ends this turn of conversation and user sees summary
[User] Next turn of conversation initiated by actual humanI guess I am mostly enjoying learning the fundamentals of AI stuff, even though I disagree with the direction it is going. But I am struggling to put into words how alarming I find the comments on threads like this — all sorts of good-natured anecdotes about how XYZ works for them that are more like the suggestions in pet care or cookery threads on Facebook. (Or worse still, like any Facebook 3D printing group: anyon…
Consider that this shared sense of rigour you have in mind is illusory, and LLMs and their context struggles are simply revealing this. I see precious little rigour in any of the 'tech' world I've lived in for decades. The tools proliferate, paradigms emerge and die and reemerge, and whatever stick you consider using to measure any of it has competitors with different units. Past the physics of power and signaling, and the prevailing cost of a silicon wafer, we are almost all, relative to a small number of much older disciplines, muddlers of various degrees of skill.
I've found dealing with context limits relatively easy: specify and confine. LLMs need clear specifications and strong guidance to produce good work.
But that's just my current muddling take on the practice. Perhaps, 90 days from now, even this burden will be gone, and a simple prompt will generate world class operating systems, programming languages and a formal basis in mathematics for both.
I've been able to avoid context size issues by applying one simple constraint to my agent loop. What I do is prevent all tool calling in the user's top-level conversation thread. Anything that needs to tool call must happen in a recursive invoke of the agent, which returns whatever results to caller. I can keep the same high level conversation going for an entire day over a million LOC+ codebase without ever hitting…
Claude Code seems to automatically do this in some cases. It seems to have some heuristic "will eat a lot of context" where it decides to dispatch a sub agent. I see it pretty frequently in troubleshooting and data analysis flows where it will dump the data collection and aggregation into a sub agent then pull out a summarized result. I'll do something similar where I have the main agent maintain context in a design…
I guess I am mostly enjoying learning the fundamentals of AI stuff, even though I disagree with the direction it is going. But I am struggling to put into words how alarming I find the comments on threads like this — all sorts of good-natured anecdotes about how XYZ works for them that are more like the suggestions in pet care or cookery threads on Facebook. (Or worse still, like any Facebook 3D printing group: anyon…
The arbitrary and non-deterministic nature of LLM workflows gives me full on ick. As an old embedded/systems guy I have always prioritized determinism and repeatability in my workflows. But damn, agents are amazing and I'm enjoying being a "thought process designer". I'm not going back. Even if AI development stops today my career will never be the same.
Can't help but feel like a lot of people who are deep in IT made it there because they hated working with humans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes intuitive sense. Can I ask what harness you're using that allows you to configure the constraint and how?
You can do this in opencode and pi (haven't used), by defining your own agents or overriding the built-in ones, so in your primary agent you can disable all tools and give it good instructions for how to delegate I imagine most harnesses should have a way to do this today, if they don't, get a new one. OpenCode i.e. is highly customizable, Claude and VS Code both support a ton as well including custom agents (though…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do this in opencode and pi (haven't used), by defining your own agents or overriding the built-in ones, so in your primary agent you can disable all tools and give it good instructions for how to delegate I imagine most harnesses should have a way to do this today, if they don't, get a new one. OpenCode i.e. is highly customizable, Claude and VS Code both support a ton as well including custom agents (though…
Thanks, those don't deterministically prevent the main loop from using tools thought, unless I'm wrong that's just prompting the main agent on when to use specialized sub agents
the main agent would be very different, basically an orchestrator, and you are "loop engineering" it, and turning off all the things for this main agent besides being able to run subagents
for opencode:
https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#permissions (what tools, mcp, etc...)
https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#task-permissions (what subagents it can call)
https://opencode.ai/docs/agents/#additional (thinking effort)