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Agentic coding notes

danluu.com

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Re: Agentic coding notes

#51

Post by zarzavat »

jacobgold wrote: post #26
zarzavat wrote: post #4

Fable changes the game yet again, because it's API-only. You're not likely to want to run Fable in a loop any more than you want to take a bunch of dollar bills and light them on fire. Every invocation of Fable has to be intentional, its context carefully managed. I feel like a babysitter.

Fable is supposed to return to subscription plans, unless I'm missing something: https://jacob.gold/posts/fable-5-removal-is-temporary/ Anthropic says the change is about capacity and is temporary. In its launch announcement on June 9, 2026, it says: "After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we c…

Apple claims their price increases are temporary too. I'll believe it when I see it. The capacity limitations are not going away any time soon.

Re: Agentic coding notes

#52

Post by HappySweeney »

wwind123 wrote: post #30
danielbln wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've been quite impressed. Opus talks the talk, Fable walks the walk.

I make Claude, Codex and Gemini review each other's design plan and implementation. Each always found a lot of things the others missed...until Fable 5 came out. Whatever plan or code Fable 5 comes up with, now it's very hard for Codex and Gemini to find any serious hole in it.

In my experience, audit findings decrease in frequency as a codebase matures. Was Fable doing greenfield work?

Re: Agentic coding notes

#53

Post by mattlondon »

progbits wrote: post #32
skrebbel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was like “woa a PGConf on the galapagos, i gotta get my ass to one if those!”

Realizing he's just using it to mean remote place in terms of AI bubble (Vancouver! What does that make all the other places that are not major tech hubs?) was a bummer. Who cares about AI, I wanted to read about living in Galapagos

I visited a decade or so ago. Most of the islands you are forbidden from staying overnight on. No running water. No power. No phone signal.

You're going to need a big big solar panel to run local inference during the day, but luckily there is plenty of sun!

Re: Agentic coding notes

#54

Post by cognitiveinline »

It's really coming down to "Do we want to subscribe to a human with a salary of many ~$10000(s) ", or "Do we spend 100(s)$ on an AI subscription"

Even with it's issues, the latest models are going to disrupt the labor economics.

Re: Agentic coding notes

#55

Post by bob1029 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #20
bob1029 wrote: post #10

A lot of the crazy ideas seem to have melted away in the face of massive context sizes. Today, I can put roughly a megabyte of utf8 text into my system prompt before things start to get weird. That is a massive amount of information even if we are being sloppy with it. You can read The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book cover-to-cover and still have room to spare. I would deeply struggle to develop a world model…

You’re forgetting that keeping the context small is better economically and delivers better results.

I learned some nuance. Small context is important if the context isn't cachable. If most of it is the same prefix every time, the situation changes pretty significantly.

Re: Agentic coding notes

#56

Post by imrehg »

bitwize wrote: post #43
duckmysick wrote: post #38

I'd like to highlight a different part of the article: > In general, when I talk to software folks about testing, I'm coming from such a different place that they immediately look at me like I'm an alien, so let's talk about how we tested at this hardware company I worked for, Centaur, which informs my biases about how I like to work. Some of the things that we did that were or are unorthodox in the software world ar…

The first thing I started wondering was "is this the same Centaur that comes up as 'CentaurHauls' on a CPUID (EAX=0)?"

Should be, judging by their LinkedIn from the bottom of the page (Centaur Technology - Member of Technical Staff: 2005 - 2013)

This is a blast from the past. Centaur was doing VIA Technology's CPUs, and I was at VIA (in Taiwan) while this author was in Centaur (in the US). I was on the embedded side, but I remember some distinct collaborations with the US team, so there's a non-zero chance to have crossed path.

Re: Agentic coding notes

#57

Post by layer8 »

cognitiveinline wrote: post #54

It's really coming down to "Do we want to subscribe to a human with a salary of many ~$10000(s) ", or "Do we spend 100(s)$ on an AI subscription" Even with it's issues, the latest models are going to disrupt the labor economics.

On the other hand, you have many more humans to choose from than models, and they don’t change their character every few months.

Re: Agentic coding notes

#58

Post by layer8 »

zapnuk wrote: post #39

There is a reasone we use left and right margin/padding. This blog is quite unreadable for 27/32" monitors.

There’s a reason not to maximize your browser windows. How do you handle HN threads on that monitor?

Re: Agentic coding notes

#59

Post by fooster »

embedding-shape wrote: post #37
bob1029 wrote: post #10

A lot of the crazy ideas seem to have melted away in the face of massive context sizes. Today, I can put roughly a megabyte of utf8 text into my system prompt before things start to get weird. That is a massive amount of information even if we are being sloppy with it. You can read The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book cover-to-cover and still have room to spare. I would deeply struggle to develop a world model…

> melted away in the face of massive context sizes If only. There is a huge difference between "Gives good responses/can easily spot things within N context size" and "Technically works but sucks within N context size", almost all models basically become cave-people once you go beyond 50% of the "supported" context size, meaning while they may technically work with 1 million output tokens, those last 500K tokens are…

I don’t find that to be true?

Re: Agentic coding notes

#60

Post by nasretdinov »

I can agree with Dan on two things: LLMs do often produce incorrect results and that it's still useful for productivity when used in moderation. For me the wrong results actually cause some kind of ragebait response so I become much more motivated to learn more about the subject to actually generate correct response. After I've learnt the subject area enough I find I'm better off having LLM review my code instead of writing it.

I haven't even begun to try to comprehend how to use fuzzing testing to improve the ability to find bugs, but it sounds really interesting. I've seen mutation testing to be very useful for finding gaps in tests, so I can only imagine that fuzzing + LLMs might produce insane results.

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