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The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: The Coming Loop

#51

Post by xpct »

Devasta wrote: post #7
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

> I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did. N…

I used to think I'll be into coding for the long haul, contributing to open source, and working on multi-year side projects.

Nearly all of that passion vanished this year, and I've been struggling to replace it. I know I'm much better than the machine now, but the lines are starting to blur, and some of the small puzzles of day-to-day have been completely automated away.

We've birthed a lot of puzzle solvers that enjoyed programming, and I'm sure many of them will move on to something else that scratches the same itch. I'm keen on learning what that will turn out to be.

Re: The Coming Loop

#52

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Like Mario tried to do... But no one listened

Re: The Coming Loop

#53

Post by skepticATX »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Yes, I am exhausted. Most of my company is obsessed with agents, because everyone wants to be seen as AI first. There is little thought going into usage. No care for long term maintainability and quality. Our product is actively worse by many metrics, but no one cares because we marketing can say “agents”.

The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).

I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.

Re: The Coming Loop

#54

Post by datadrivenangel »

mmillin wrote: post #49

>Yet even with a lot of manual steering, that type of code does not come out of LLMs naturally, and even if the code comes out naturally like that, they will still attempt to handle now impossible errors. This is something I’ve struggled to fight against in many PR reviews. Especially once already written, convincing someone that their excessive null checking is harmful is an uphill battle. Short of better modeling (…

And AI code reviews encourage overly delusional defensive paranoia. triple null checking deep inside a function is technically a real risk, but in practice should never be hit because you've checked for nulls in every function that calls or could call the function in question and is thus not necessarily worth guarding against.

Re: The Coming Loop

#55

Post by jazzypants »

zipy124 wrote: post #44
jazzypants wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this sentiment is diluted by commits like this: https://github.com/nfcampos/loop-dev/commit/e28b1fce0078e605... I assume that GP was just saying that they would prefer to read these thoughts written by a human author (preferably you). I agree.

This commit seems to mostly be grammar fixes? If someone used a spell/grammar checker it might produce a diff similar to this. Why does the fact it was Claude and not Microsoft Word or other matter in this case?

Because Microsoft Word doesn't write blog posts for you

Edit: I just realized that Microsoft Word probably does do that now, and I hate it.

Re: The Coming Loop

#56

Post by rcarmo »

rcarmo wrote: post #47

There's _way_ more than one way to do "loops". I just asked one of my superviors/auditors to document how it's been working while monitoring a few other agents that have long-term goals: https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/4922b550ab48bf0b4246c77e606a5...

I'm glad HN prefers downvoting actual work/demos to discussing them.

Re: The Coming Loop

#57

Post by [deleted] »

Devasta wrote: post #7
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

> I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I have basically stopped writing code in my spare time since the advent of AI. Before I felt like I was working on a classic car. Was it a practical use of my time? No. I could go out and download software that did what I wanted. Did I have fun doing it? Yes, the act of working on it was important, I felt I was still learning and improving as I did. N…

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Loop

#58

Post by zipy124 »

jazzypants wrote: post #55
zipy124 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This commit seems to mostly be grammar fixes? If someone used a spell/grammar checker it might produce a diff similar to this. Why does the fact it was Claude and not Microsoft Word or other matter in this case?

Because Microsoft Word doesn't write blog posts for you Edit: I just realized that Microsoft Word probably does do that now, and I hate it.

Yes but that commit doesn't support the fact that it has written it for the user.

Re: The Coming Loop

#59

Post by aabdi »

The post suggests fear about a surge of increasing amounts of code by loops and loops of agents.

I don’t know if I like the current world without it though.

80% of different teams code the code is poorly tested. The code doesn’t handle data consistency or asynchronous code properly because the engineers don’t know better (and frankly don’t care enough).

Dependency handling is poorly managed leading to low quality operations with improper dashboards, alarms, and ops.

Badly managed processes leads to people doing monkey work signing off checklists rather than automation.

Frankly… why is keeping any of that good? It really pisses me off seeing people accept any of that low quality but that standard is the default and not the outlier.

Re: The Coming Loop

#60

Post by noodletheworld »

joenot443 wrote: post #30

We've had great success with agents thus far at my job. A year into Clauding and all our dev metrics are up while our downtime has remained steady. Being an iOS engineer, much of my engineering cycle these days is going from Figma/PRD → spec → code. After being handed off to QA, we handle the bugs and product slips as they come through, while we simultaneously build/spec the upcoming addition. This is basically the s…

Use appium or XCTest or swift testing; generate the tests first (failing) from the spec.

The loop is basically then a while loop:

While (tests fail) { trigger agent: spec, failures list }

for bugs, write failing tests.

Its basically TDD.

Loops do nothing useful beyond making the “spec -> code” step more “hands off” and let you be confident that the code you write does what is intended.

Obviously you see the issue: writing the loop harness is > effort than not having it…

…but the idea is that you run “spec first” and are totally hands off on the code, just updating the validation step and then waiting while the agent iterates over and over to solve for some solution that passes the loop harness.

People suggest that it is possible to go, eg. directly figma/jira to harness via (random tool here), saving even more time and invoking even fewer humans, but thats currently, as far as I can tell, actually just hype.

No one is actually doing that effectively.

Loops are currently carefully hand crafted, which makes them tedious and of questionable value imo.

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