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Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#121

Post by d5lt5 »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #95
d5lt5 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They're talking about writing a file with a harness-native Edit tool. They're saying the agents aren't doing that, but are using ad-hoc methods of writing the files. (My agents seem to prefer see these days.)

Why do you think your agents prefer to create scripts instead of doing tool calls these days?

I wonder, is it easier to modify a script that agent wrote before to satisfy your prompt, or is it easier to write a new one from scratch each time a retry happens?

Are input tokens more expensive than output tokens?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#123

Post by whstl »

well_ackshually wrote: post #45
bob1029 wrote: post #18

> And potentially as a byproduct of enabling all of this, you can now slop your way to a one-shot 3D game over the weekend which looks impressive. I think we've finally reached a weird point where AI has effectively reduced the amount of competition that real game developers have to endure. Nothing unravels faster than a game project being built with AI. You can achieve impressive results in a day, but you can't get…

Yep. Every single post I've seen about "game development is over" is yet another procedurally generated game. Not only it doesn't prove anything about Astra being "better" at making games (do people have any idea the sheer amount of open source games that do exactly that? You can find thousands of the same planet exploration games through repos, blog posts,etc. Game design schools have it as an exercise, that's how b…

Funny, it's not that different in the web-space.

Most of AI is being used to generate procedural content. It is impressive on the first video or first image, and it might look useful on the surface, but it gets grating quite fast.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#124

Post by pazimzadeh »

codingisfreedom wrote: post #43

I’ve asked Astra to build me an app for a prototype I created quickly using Sonnet. It’s been 2 days and it made no real progress on the actual app. It created docs, scripts, workflows, and it’s doing a bunch of reviewing on every PR. I told it that I just need an MVP. I’m pretty sure an average senior engineer would have finished that task much quicker, and guaranteed with more readable, higher-quality code. Meanwhi…

I don't know how to make apps or evaluate code, but with astra I having been making an iOS app on my own for the first time and it's going great. my app is not terribly complex but requires using bluetooth and other intricacies which I thought would be tough. but it's going really well. I'm not asking it to one-shot it though, I'm going feature by feature, testing and building up.

yes, at first it would run simulator tests on all font sizes but it stopped after I asked it not to do that until UI review

maybe sol would have done the same thing, idk. but I find the whole process to be really nice with astra. I use it on high unless it says something is impossible then i go max and ask it to find alternatives (happened once)

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#125

Post by gps372 »

troupo wrote: post #66
gps372 wrote: post #55

Early lesson I learned from AI engineering was - there is no substitute to giving a groomed epic to an agent. Instead of simply saying 'implement themes in my product' you need to be specific, in fact more specific than usual. You need to say exactly what is in scope and what's not, even down to a buttons, events and layouts. You can groom the epic with the help of AI, but final review must be done by someone who can…

> Instead of simply saying 'implement themes in my product' you need to be specific, in fact more specific than usual. Around February you could get away with very vague prompts to Claude. I feel like models have regressed since

Actually this was a real incident around the end of Feb this year when we had just started experimenting with spec driven development (SDD).

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#126

Post by layer8 »

omnicognate wrote: post #118
layer8 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no “required” amount. More gets produced using the same area, using more people, but keeping these people in poverty because productivity per capita doesn’t increase. Instead the gains from the increased volume of production get captured by an elite. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41257-019-0021-y .

What corresponds to land in the AI analogy to this?

There is no direct analogy, the term has drifted since. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#127

Post by coldtea »

>I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.

Isn't the term "diminishing returns" already covering that?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#128

Post by [deleted] »

petesergeant wrote: post #8

Ironically I burned out Fable usage early this week because of Astra using it to run inane full codebase reviews over one line changes, so I have been using Astra extensively. We need a word for “potentially highly capable, but in reality an idiot savant” to describe certain models. No, I don’t need you to write a tmux emulator in bash to test your changes bro, just ask me to run the command.

[deleted]

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#130

Post by orphereus »

zarzavat wrote: post #28
jaapz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use a constrained edit tool when you are also allowed to use the complete power of python?

Because the complete power of Python also includes the power to fuck things up.

So does using an LLM.
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