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The Shape of Things to Come

yegge.ai

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Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#3
I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement.

But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals.

I expected Yegge to, at some point, assuming this isn't still all satire, to take a step back and take stock that the basic harness are improving faster than the rate at which these complex beasts can adjust.

But the opposite has happened, he's dived fully into believing that the secret to unlocking the power of AI is to wrap more layers of AI around it.

If you actually want a problem worked on all night, just fire up fable, type /goal and then describe the goal. With permissive run settings it'll crunch for as long as it needs.

I've not seen any evidence that wrapping that in a further 3 or 4 layers of agents improves anything.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#5
nb: current models (e.g. GPT 5.6 Sol) are very good at long horizon tasks

they no longer need crutches or rube goldberg machines to keep them going

minimal agent harness is just a loop that loops until no more tool calls are coming

GPT 5.6 Sol continues to drive the loop until the task is done or it decides that it wants to present the user with information

at that point it is probably good to not automatically continue (!)

(YMMV of course, for some tasks it makes sense, then you can still add a loop around it + the necessary signals, the main thing I want to say is that what used to be essential to keep models going is no longer needed, current models can do long-horizon tasks way better than when these outer loops where necessary)

self-plug: "smol", is a minimal agent in ~20 lines of Go that implements this pattern (keeps going until no more tool calls):

https://github.com/smol-env/smol

works just fine

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#6
post #3

I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement. But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals. I expected Yegge to, at…

I'm still on the fence whether Yegge is being satirical, some phrases are just too on-the-nose:

> Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself.

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#7
I used to like Steve's posts. They were all way too long, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless. He started to lose me when at Sourcegraph where he oversell Cody which didn't do anything useful (I even had a commercial meeting with Sourcegraph people who weren't of much help); then he completely lost me with his GasTown business where AI meets crypto (what could possibly go wrong with that). Now I can't read anything from him anymore ;-(

Re: The Shape of Things to Come

#8
post #3

I don't like using the term "AI psychosis" because it originally meant a narrow definition resulting in genuine psychosis and acute mental health trauma, but seems to have widened to anyone falling down a much wider trapdoor of AI engagement. But I read, or at least attempt to read, something like this, and I can't help but marvel at the capture that AI agents seem to have on some individuals. I expected Yegge to, at…

I mean, the dude uses a lot of jargon, ego, and mythologizes stuff but the article comes down to a pretty simple practice:

Run a big task queue, have a smart model manage a cheap model on every ticket, set up a cron for models to automatically work off of events, stop gating merges on builds, and expect to spend a quarter of your time maintaining the machinery (all of it currently subsidized by many $200 accounts).

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