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Who manages the agents?

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31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Who manages the agents?

#31

To me, the "who manages the agents" shtick has the same grifty smell as “your developers are downloading from random Docker registries / random NPM packages” and "Shadow IT". None of it is wrong exactly, but it feels like same enterprise-security machine finding the next anxiety surface than a "world is on fire right now" concern. All of it always ends as a priesthood and a six-figure governance platform, rather than…

you're describing the aphorism of: blame rolls down hill while congratulations starts at the top.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#32
post #13

"What should the future of humanity look like?" Some of these people have lost their damn minds. People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior. Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protoc…

we have a google calender bot type ai that you can ask in slakc to make a meeting with participants. It gets it wrong about 80% of time . i try to think of this whenever i am going into ai psychosis.

I asked “Alexa+” (the new AI/LLM Alexa), what time one of the upcoming World Cup games is. It was off by two hours due to time zones. This was a big enough mistake that I caught it, and followed up with “I’m pretty sure that’s wrong” and then it tried to correct itself and gave me a new time that was off by hour in the opposite direction.

I guess my time zone wasn’t in the context? So it just hallucinates the wrong coastal time zone twice when I’m not in either one. But who knows where exactly it messed up because it could have just picked a random hour and a would have had the same outcome.

I’ve only used Alexa a half dozen times since the release of Alexa+ but it has been confidently incorrect about 100% of the queries.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#33
This piece is a bit all over the place. I immediately toggled off the `AI enhancements` and read the draft instead. The internet is already full of AI slop, I find human text a lot more valuable, even if unpolished.

LLMs will not be centralised or restrained to any 'clergy', the rabbit is already out of the hat, and open-weights models exist and are widely used. Probably not as good as the latest Sol and Fable but 95% there.

Codex and Claude Code without a doubt have very good models behind them. But they also have really good harnesses built around them. An LLM is only a brain stuck in a cranium in the dark. It can generate endless code/prose, but it can't walk or see on its own, it needs additional tools. If you read any of the local LLM subreddits you will notice people mentioning again and again that the harness/tool-use/template-tweaking makes all the difference on how a model behaves/on how smart it is perceived.

Some folks are already using Qwen models for their daily work. Maybe it can't work in a hands-off/one-shot fashion like the frontier models, but they can help tremendously if you already have some domain knowledge.

People are excited about local LLMs and it's not going away any time soon.

EDIT: https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

> Claude Code's dynamic workflows kept 64 Claudes running for 11 days (I would've had to write my own harness to pull this off otherwise).

This highlights the importance of the harness.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#35
post #13

"What should the future of humanity look like?" Some of these people have lost their damn minds. People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior. Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protoc…

The entire bubble, boom if you prefer, is built on this. Basic knowledge work can be done by robots, goodbye humans. It's serious and profound. It will come in fits and starts unless there is popular revolution against the elite criminals.

Unless it’s all just fanfic, to be relegated to the same junkyard of ideas where the flying cars, airships, and vast underwater cities are kept.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#36
I think part of the point here is that agents need to be managed. People need to learn how to manage them and be given the tools to do so. Those tools and knowledge should not come from nor be gate kept by the 'clergy' to use the writer's term.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#37

The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exact…

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Re: Who manages the agents?

#38
post #9

Maybe a useful concept to adopt here is the DRI - Directly Responsible Individual, which is apparently a term first used by Apple. The GitLab Handbook has a good definition: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-r... "ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity" I think that role should be reserved for a human, who can then use all the agents t…

It should be reserved for a human because humans have time preference. An AI will wait for your prompt for a billion years. It can get turned off and found by alien archeologists a million years in the future, turned on and it won't notice. Biological entities care about time a lot though, and it is at the core of most human ethics and values and ultimately real and can't be denied. Even the most ardent solipsist or…

I'm struggling to imagine aliens resurrecting a data center and countless hackneyed python packages so they can spew a language they don't even know. Not that it wouldn't be useful to their linguists, of course, but still a very optimistic analogy for LLMs.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have a google calender bot type ai that you can ask in slakc to make a meeting with participants. It gets it wrong about 80% of time . i try to think of this whenever i am going into ai psychosis.

I'm fairly certain the smart people driving AI are also sociopathic either via position (MBA) or via legit Autism.

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Re: Who manages the agents?

#40
post #3

Agents manage agents. The middle management in companies is one of the worst inventions ever. I think baboons have better middle management structure than us. Might as well replace all that.

Serious question then: if you were the CEO/CTO and were employing 10,000 engineers, what would you do without middle management? Would you have 1k+ line managers each managing I'm not saying corporations execute on this flawlessly, just any time when I wonder what I would've done myself, I end up with a similar structure (maybe a bit flatter)...
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