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Tools: Code Is All You Need

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Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#101

Post by sebzim4500 »

benreesman wrote: post #47
whiplash451 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take but too bearish on LLMs in my opinion. LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.

What we call an LLM today (by which almost everyone means an autogressive language model from the Generative Pretrained Transformer family tree, and BERTs are still doing important eork, believe that) is actually an offshoot of neural machine translation. This isn't (intentionally at least) mere HN pedantry: they really do act like translation tools in a bunch of observable ways. And while they have recently crossed…

>LLMs? Look more and more like the Metaverse every day as concerns the economics.

ChatGPT has 800M+ weekly active users how is that comparable to the Metaverse in any way?

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#102

Post by threatofrain »

foobarbecue wrote: post #29
pclowes wrote: post #5

Directionally I think this is right. Most LLM usage at scale tends to be filling the gaps between two hardened interfaces. The reliability comes not from the LLM inference and generation but the interfaces themselves only allowing certain configuration to work with them. LLM output is often coerced back into something more deterministic such as types, or DB primary keys. The value of the LLM is determined by how well…

Hype cycle for drones and VR was similar -- at the peak, you have people claiming drones will take over package delivery and everyone will spend their day in VR. Reality is that the applicability is more narrow.

Good drones are very Chinese atm, as is casual consumer drone delivery. Americans might be more than a decade away even with concerted bipartisan war-like effort to boost domestic drone competency.

The reality is Chinese.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#103

Post by nativeit »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #62
dingnuts wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cost: They keep getting cheaper and cheaper no they don't[0], the cost is just still hidden from you but the freebies will end just like MoviePass and cheap Ubers https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsw4vatg3k2b "Cursor released a $200-a-month subscription then made their $20-a-month subscription worse (worse output, slower) - yet it seems even on Max they're rate limiting people!" https://bsky.app/profile/…

The cost will stay hidden from me because my job will pay it, just like the cost of my laptop, o365 license, and every other tool I use at work.

Until they use your salary to pay for another dozen licenses.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#104

Post by whiplash451 »

kibwen wrote: post #92
whiplash451 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take but too bearish on LLMs in my opinion. LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.

No, 3D printers are the backbone of modern physical prototyping. They're far more important to today's global economy than LLMs are, even if you don't have the vantage point to see it from your sector. That might change in the future, but snapping your fingers to wink LLMs out of existence would change essentially nothing about how the world works today; it would be a non-traumatic non-event. There just hasn't been t…

> snapping your fingers to wink LLMs out of existence would change essentially nothing about how the world works today

One could have said the same thing about Google in 2006

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#105

Post by nativeit »

baal80spam wrote: post #8

Isn't it a bit like saying: saw is all you need (for carpenters)? I mean, you _probably_ could make most furniture with only a saw, but why?

In this analogy, do you have to design, construct, and learn from first principles to operate literally every other tool you'd like to use in addition to the saw?

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#106

Post by stpedgwdgfhgdd »

mritchie712 wrote: post #2

> try completing a GitHub task with the GitHub MCP, then repeat it with the gh CLI tool. You'll almost certainly find the latter uses context far more efficiently and you get to your intended results quicker. This is spot on. I have a "devops" folder with a CLAUDE.md with bash commands for common tasks (e.g. find prod / staging logs with this integration ID). When I complete a novel task (e.g. count all the rows that…

I do something similar, but the problem is that claude.md keeps on growing.

To tackle this, I converted a custom prompt into an application, but there is an interesting trade-off. The application is deterministic. It cannot deal with unknown situations. In contrast to CC, which is way slower, but can try alternative ways of dealing with an unknown situation.

I ended up with adding an instruction to the custom command to run the application and fix the application code (TDD) if there is a problem. Self healing software… who ever thought

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#107

Post by CharlieDigital » 

    > So maybe we need to look at ways to find a better abstraction for what MCP is great at, and code generation. For that that we might need to build better sandboxes and maybe start looking at how we can expose APIs in ways that allow an agent to do some sort of fan out / fan in for inference. Effectively we want to do as much in generated code as we can, but then use the magic of LLMs after bulk code execution to judge what we did.
Por que no los dos? I ended up writing an OSS MCP server that securely executes LLM generated JavaScript using a C# JS interpreter (Jint) and handing it a `fetch` analogue as well as `jsonpath-plus`. Also gave it a built-in secrets manager.

Give it an objective and the LLM writes its own code and uses the tool iteratively to accomplish the task (as long as you can interact with it via a REST API).

For well known APIs, it does a fine job generating REST API calls.

You can pretty much do anything with this.

https://github.com/CharlieDigital/runjs

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#108

Post by nativeit »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #69
osigurdson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody likes coding in bash but everyone does it (a little) because it is everywhere.

> because it is everywhere Except for the fact that actually it is not everywhere.

I see your point, but bear with me here--it kind of is.

I suppose if one wanted to be pedantically literal, then you are indeed correct. In every other meaningful consideration, the parent comment is. Maybe not Bash specifically, but #!/bin/sh is broadly available on nearly every connected device on the planet, in some capacity. From the perspective of how we could automate nearly anything, you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#109

Post by nativeit »

hollerith wrote: post #56
forrestthewoods wrote: post #31

Unpopular Opinion: I hate Bash. Hate it. And hate the ecosystem of Unix CLIs that are from the 80s and have the most obtuse, inscrutable APIs ever designed. Also this ecosystem doesn’t work on Windows — which, as a game dev, is my primary environment. And no, WSL does not count. I don’t think the world needs yet another shell scripting language. They’re all pretty mediocre at best. But maybe this is an opportunity to…

Me, too. Also, Unix as a whole is overrated. One reason it won was an agreement mediated by a Federal judge presiding over an anti-trust trial that AT&T would not enter the computer market while IBM would not enter the telecommunications market, so Unix was distributed at zero cost rather than sold. Want to get me talking reverentially about the pioneers of our industry? Talk to me about Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC an…

> Also, Unix as a whole is overrated. One reason it won was an agreement mediated by a Federal judge presiding over an anti-trust trial that AT&T would not enter the computer market while IBM would not enter the telecommunications market, so Unix was distributed at zero cost rather than sold.

What did Unix win?

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#110

Post by pamelafox »

Regarding the Playwright example: I had the same experience this week attempting to build an agent first by using the Playwright MCP server, realizing it was slow, token-inefficient, and flaky, and rewriting with direct Playwright calls.

MCP servers might be fun to get an idea for what's possible, and good for one-off mashups, but API calls are generally more efficient and stable, when you know what you want.

Here's the agent I ended up writing: https://github.com/pamelafox/personal-linkedin-agent

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/live/ue8D7Hi4nGs

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