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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#121

Post by refactor_master »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #45

Does anyone else get dull feelings of dread reading this kind of thing? How do you combat it?

My company’s use of code is a means to an end, not the goal. If we could just have all our code written in bash loops that’d be a brilliant time saver. Unfortunately, some of the code is very gnarly business-y, poorly tested, and may even have wrong assumptions about the business.

Additionally, we have multiple languages, both software and hardware products and finally there’s also the question of external stakeholders, of which there are many. So AI would need a tremendous amount of oversight for that to work.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#122

Post by kuschku »

kh_hk wrote: post #22

I am honestly surprised how we went from almost OCD TDD and type purism, to a "it kinda works" attitude to software.

There's always been both sides.

One creating a foundation of absolutely stable, reliable code, methodically learning from every mistake. This code lives for many decades to come.

The other building throwaway projects as fast as possible, with no regard to specs, constraints, reliability or even legality. They use ecery trick in the book, and even the ones that aren't yet. They've always been much faster than the first group.

Except AI now makes the second group 10× faster yet again.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#123

Post by ilijavanil »

andyferris wrote: post #95

People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot, or that GPT5 can solve a problem that Gemini 2.5 Pro cannot, or that Sonnet 4 can solve some problem that GPT5 cannot. There was a blog article about mixing together different agents into the same conversation, taking turns at responses and improving results/correctness. But it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone…

https://github.com/albertvucinovic/chat.sh

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#124

Post by rausr »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #14

> After finishing the port, most of the agents settled for writing extra tests or continuously updating agent/TODO.md to clarify how "done" they were. In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop. Ok, now that is funny! On so many levels. Now, for the project itself, a few thoughts: - this was tried before, about 1.5 years ago there was a project…

> the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop.

Did it just solve The Halting Problem? ;)

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#125

Post by zer00eyz »

dhorthy wrote: post #29
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

When Claude starts deploying Kafka clusters I’m outro

I have seen a few dozen Kafka installs.

I have seen one Kafka instal that was really the best tool for the job.

More than a hand full of them could have been replaced by Redis, and in the worst cases could have been a table in Postgres.

If Claude thinks it fine, remember it's only a reflection of the dumb shit it finds in its training data.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#126

Post by ehnto »

dhorthy wrote: post #18
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #14

> After finishing the port, most of the agents settled for writing extra tests or continuously updating agent/TODO.md to clarify how "done" they were. In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop. Ok, now that is funny! On so many levels. Now, for the project itself, a few thoughts: - this was tried before, about 1.5 years ago there was a project…

Yeah the NIH thing is super on point. small saas tools for everything is done. Bring on the hand coded custom in-house admin monolith? Is Unix “small sharp tools” going away? Is that a relic of having to write everything in x86 and we’re now just finally hitting the end of the arc?

I am excited by the idea that small businesses with super unique problems may now be able to leverage custom software.

I have long held that high software salaries withhold the power of boutique software from its potential applications in small businesses.

It's possible we're about to see what unleashing software in small businesses might have looked like, to some degree, just with much less expert guidance and wisdom.

I am a developer so my point of view on salaries is not out of bitterness.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#127

Post by seba_dos1 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #113
doug_durham wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though. One of the superpowers of LLMs is code reading. I say the tools are better and reading than writing. It is very easy to get comprehensive documentation for any code base and get understanding by asking questions. At that point does it matter that there is a living developer who understands the code? If an arbitrary person with knowledge of the technology stack can get up to speed quickly is it import…

I don't think LLM can generate good docs for not self documenting code:) Any obscure long function you can't figure out yourself and you're out of luck

Yeah, when I see all those hyped people, I keep wondering: had they not spent enough time with LLMs to notice that yet, or is what they work on just so trivial for it to not matter?

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#128

Post by aitchnyu »

VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

Do we have a method to let AI analyze the data within the DBs and figure out how to port it to a well designed db? I'm a fan of the philosophy of write strong data structures and stupid algorithms around them, your data will outlive your application, etc. Simple example is a Mongodb field which stores same thing as int or string, relationships without foreign keys in Postgres etc. Then frustrating shit like somebody creating an entire table since he cant `ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN`

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#129

Post by enos_feedler »

VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

Its alright because you can shove all of that into an LLM and have it fixed instantly

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#130

Post by worthless-trash »

enos_feedler wrote: post #129
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup. Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years. But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no lo…

Its alright because you can shove all of that into an LLM and have it fixed instantly

See, you're using the definition of "Fixed" from the future, not the current definition of fixed.
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