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Who manages the agents?

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Re: Who manages the agents?

#61

Post by matthewfcarlson »

simonw wrote: 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’s a double edged sword. You are responsible for a thing. But you can’t just wave a wand and say “x team needs to do y for the thing I am a DRI for”. There are some resources in Apple University (an internal learning resource) about navigating it. “Influence without control” and while it’s helpful, they acknowledge it sucks sometimes.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#62

Post by Humorist2290 »

weego wrote: 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…

I can't remember right now where from, but I do remember some 10ish years ago listening to an NPR spot from some philosopher who claimed there was an existential crisis in the field of philosophy. The premise that I do remember was that our technology, our policy, and our society has all outpaced our ethics and our philosophy. The person was making the argument that we as a society would struggle to cope with the continued development of technology when we could barely cope with personal loss and structural inequality.

At the time it felt prescient; now it just feels too late.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#63

Post by fragmede »

pmg101 wrote: post #59
Tenemo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)...

I've also wondered about it. I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was designed and built from scratch with a team of 3 which eventually peaked at 20-30. Does anyone seriously believe a company building a web app needs 10,000 engineers?

"web app" covers a lot of surface though. Yes, if the web app in question is a static site that AI can shit out in 20 minutes, it doesn't need 10,000 engineers, but what about building, and running, and operating something like, say, Instagram. Which has a web app. End-to-end, all of it, down to racking servers in data centers across the world, 10,000 engineers sounds reasonable. So start by defining what this hypothetical webapp and how much kubernetes is involved.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#64

Post by t-writescode »

manmal wrote: post #54

> The best agentic developers are now probably exceeding 100x, doing massive rewrites of codebases that would have taken years of engineering in days I‘m not denying that you can get far with a port of a well tested codebase. But it’s a bit of a selective example, no? Porting a large framework to Rust is not something that’s making up a meaningful fraction of a developer’s time usually. It’s also a bit of a luxury IM…

To add to this, for all the claims of 100x, can anyone cite an example of someone actually pushing 100x in a domain that isn’t “translate or port tool/library/whatever from language A to language B”? Because that’s literally what LLMs were invented for and that’s not a normal part of work.

I will fully admit we have examples of people converting Postgres to Rust, HL2 to wasm, etc. but that’s all porting. The code was there, we’re just translating it, warts and original-languagisms and all.

But even if you’re making a bunch of tiny tools and chaining them together, I can’t see more than a 2-3x sustained increase.

We also have artists that can make games now, and that 0-1 transition sure feels like 100x and maybe it is; but the problem of “starting feels impossible and the barrier is too high” to “I can now actually do something” is not where the 100x developer idea comes from either.

And that 0-1 change asymptotes really quickly to, again, maybe a sustained 2-3x once the artist understands the domain.

So, does the 100x person, who isn’t a novice and who isn’t literally translating existing code from A to B, exist? What are some real world examples?

Edit: I will concede one area: the investigation stage. E.g. “Does this code have an exploit?” I would argue that’s not generating new output (yet), but it is a great deal of work that is simplified and sped up. It’s also where most of my own use of AI speeds me up considerably as a developer.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#65

Post by nradov »

estetlinus wrote: post #48

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

It still can't even accurately recognize my wife's name for voice dialing. And I don't even have a speech impediment or strong accent or anything.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#66

Post by jagged-chisel »

therein wrote: post #45
snailmailman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I am seeing a lot of people suffering from AI psychosis getting interested in writing a trading bot using large language models. They give them access to basic market data and then ask the model for analysis of the current market conditions. The bot talks about seeing high volume here, that being a confirmation for this, and that doing an invalidation of that etc. I looked into it after someone pitched me theirs, onl…

I found a scam online about 18 months ago that was selling access to some "AI trading platform" that was supposed to have the kind of bot you mention. I used the live chat to talk to someone and asked about demonstrable proof - like given data up through the end of last month, make picks for this month, then look at this month's data to see how it would have done.

"Then this product is not for you." Right, not for anyone thinking critically about how any of this works.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#67

Post by hoppp »

Tenemo wrote: post #40
hoppp wrote: 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)...

I heard Microsoft has 14 layers of middle management just for the xbox team.

14 layers!!

There are people whose sole purpose is to have meetings to pass information to other people, who will then have meetings about who to have meetings with.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#68

Post by bicx »

estetlinus wrote: post #48

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

You definitely seem to have a much lower exposure level to flagship AI models. I manage fleets of AI agents (and manage engineers who manage fleets of AI agents) all day for my job, and I’m rarely touching code anymore. It’s not perfect, but it is insanely powerful.

I’m having to actively plan for changes to our EPD org because what we need engineers to do today is a lot different than a year ago.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#69

Post by nradov »

pmg101 wrote: post #59
Tenemo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)...

I've also wondered about it. I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was designed and built from scratch with a team of 3 which eventually peaked at 20-30. Does anyone seriously believe a company building a web app needs 10,000 engineers?

There's a lot more to the world than web apps. What if you need to build a 6th-generation fighter? Can a team of 30 do that with some AI agents?
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