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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?

#141

Post by gps372 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #91
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…

> in fact more specific than usual. At which point you might as well write the code yourself and get a deterministic result faster, better and cheaper.

I have realized that it's like giving a task to a brilliant coder who has just joined the org and is more excited and eager than usual. Hence the responsibility falls squarely on you to set scope constraints while ensuring only to-the-point features are developed.

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

#142

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Bluestein wrote: post #119
troupo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Feb/April was peak for code.-

Wasn't this during the period where they had a bunch of bugs around caching and the models were making loads of weird decisions?

I honestly feel like basically nobody knows anything about these models, it's all just vibes (and I'm no different).

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

#143

Post by thewhitetulip »

rootlocus wrote: post #48
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?

Simple is better than complex Complex is better than complicated Or something, I don't remember...

That was pre LLM. Now everything is a prompt that you type into AI lol

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

nojs wrote: post #68

This matches my experience with Astra so far too. > I think I’m suspecting something is going “wrong” in the training process. The model is greatly rewarded for succeeding on long-horizon tasks, but presumably there is very little punishing going on for “shitty code.” My suspicion is that both OpenAI and Anthropic moved their RL agendas from "being rated as useful according to human feedback" to "succeeds at long hor…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by matt3210 »

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…

If you define what you want in typescript by updating existing typescript wordage, you get what you want exactly as specified, with minimal token cost and no ip theft.

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

#146

Post by elAhmo »

d5lt5 wrote: post #115
elAhmo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying scripts from agents are deterministic? :)

Why don't you try to dispove me. Yes, they are _more_ deterministic than tool calls and consume less tokens.

There is nothing to disprove as you don't understand what does a word mean. Deterministic is not a spectrum, they can either be deterministic or not. In both cases, they are not.

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

#147

Post by sensanaty »

taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing

Well that one's easy to answer, they're either A) lying, or B) working on the simplest possible software where this kind of stuff doesn't explode. Or the alternative 3rd option of what you mentioned, the initial pre-MVP phase goes decently but then it all collapses inevitably as the slop accumulates and the codebases become unmaintainable grey blobs, but that hardly matters to them because their MVP app never makes it past that initial stage before they jump ship to a new "amazing" idea.

The lying comes down to astroturfing and shilling from the LLM companies that want to sell people on the idea of vibecoding and tokenmaxxing.

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

#148

Post by bob1029 »

generic92034 wrote: post #54
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…

> LLMs will never be able That is a very bold claim, unless you meant "current LLMs".

The coordinate system in game scenes is known as "world space", but that rarely means our world.

How do you train an LLM to create a world that only exists in an artist's head?

I think spending a day with just the lighting systems alone would alleviate us of any misunderstandings here. Getting lighting to work right isn't something you can solve by duct taping a vision model to the contraption.

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

#149

Post by gps372 »

samuell wrote: post #138
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…

Yeah, I think as a general direction we need to allow a useful collaboration with the agents on the issue board. This is btw why Epiq was developed, to keep the board as code, git-backed, distributed (via an event log mechanism), and with the ability to replay the board, to see what agents actually did: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq

thanks for sharing, going through your blog about cognitive debt.

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

#150

Post by notduckrabbit »

djmips wrote: post #69
AmazingTurtle wrote: post #29

gpt-6-astra is a bitch, it constantly scope creeps itself with "yet another thing" to give it that darn polished lick. the results are eventually a little bit better but at what cost? let's do the math. gpt-5.6-sol: 1x base gpt-6-astra 2.5x base in subscription then gpt-6-astra tends to spawn subagents a lot, often with all kinds of models such as gpt-5.6, 5.3-codex etc., which is neat. it's a good coordinator but ev…

have you ever worked for a big company where that's the status quo for any tiny change... hours on _full test suites_ over and over again.

Astra will initiate test suites, find one more thing independently while its running, reinitiate complete test suite after fixing it, then find one more thing, then test again. Easy to burn through GH actions minutes if you're not careful orchestrating.
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