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Tools: Code Is All You Need

lucumr.pocoo.org

131–140 of 234 posts

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#131

The problem I see with MCP is very simple. It's using JSON as the format and that's nowhere as expressive as a programming language. Consider a python function signature list_containers(show_stopped: bool = False, name_pattern: Optional[str] = None, sort: Literal["size", "name", "started_at"] = "name"). It doesn't even need docs Now convert this to JSON schema which is 4x larger input already. And when generating out…

the reason to use the llm is that you dont know ahead of time that the vehicle type is only a car or motorcycle, and the llm will also figure out a way to detail bycicles and boats and airplanes, and to consider both left and right shoes separately.

the llm cant just be given this function because its specialized to just the two options.

you could have it do a feedback loop of rewriting the python script after running it, but whats the savings at tha point? youre wasting tokens talking about cars in python when you already know is a ski, and the llm could ask directly for the ski details without writing a script to do it in between

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#132
post #25

Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem. The job then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model. That still takes significant skill an…

Giving LLMs the right context -- eg in the form of predefined "cognitive tools", as explored with a ton of rigor here^1 -- seems like the way forward, at least to this casual observer.

1. https://github.com/davidkimai/Context-Engineering/blob/main/...

(the repo is a WIP book, I've only scratched the surface but it seems pretty brilliant to me)

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reference is the daily usage of chatgpt around me (outside of tech circles). I don’t want to sound like a hard-core LLM believer. I get your point and it’s fair. I just wanted to point out that the current usage of chatgpt is a lot broader than that of 3D printers even at the peak hype of it.

Outside of tech circles it looks like NFTs: people following hype using tech they don't understand which will be popular until the downsides we're aware of that they are ignorant to have consequences, and then the market will reflect the shift in opinion.

Even if the most bearish predictions turn out to be correct, the comparison of LLMs to NFTs is a galaxy-spanning stretch.

NFTs are about as close to literally useless as it gets, and that was always obvious; 99% of the serious attention paid to them came from hustlers and speculators.

LLMs, for all their limitations, are already good at some things and useful in some ways. Even in the areas where they are (so far) too unreliable for serious use, they're not pure hype and bullshit; they're doing things that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#134
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s not happening at the scale it was pitched, then it’s not happening.

This makes no sense, just because something didn't become as big as the hypemen said it would doesn't make the inventions or users of those inventions disappear.

For something to be considered “happening” you can’t just have a handful of localized examples. It has to be happening at a large noticeable scale that even people unfamiliar with the tech are noticing. Then you can say it’s “happening”. Otherwise, it’s just smaller groups of people doing stuff.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#136
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No, not even close. By 2006 all sorts of load-bearing infrastructure was relying on Google (e.g. Gmail). Today LLMs are still on the edge of important systems, rather than underlying those systems.

Things like BERT are a load bearing structure in data science pipelines.

I assume there are massive number of LLM analysis pipelines out there.

I suppose it depends if you consider non determinist DS/ML pipelines "loadbearing" or not. Most are not using LLMs though.

3D parts regularly are used beyond prototyping though as tooling for a small company can be higher than just metal 3D parts. So I do somewhat agree but the loss of productivity in software prototyping would be a massive hit if LLMs vanished.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#137
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You checked out drone warfare? It’s all the rage in every conflict at the moment. The hype around drones is not fake, and I’d compare it more to autonomous cars because regulation is the only reason you don’t see a million private drones flying around.

Yes, to an extent, but I would say that is an extension of artillery and long-range fire capabilities.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#139
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is a hole in the ground where something between 100 billion and a trillion dollars in the ground that so far has about 20B in revenue (not profit) going into it annually. This is a concern for me. I'm using claude-code daily and find it very useful, but I'm expecting the price to continue getting jacked up. I do want to support Anthropic, but they might eventually need to cross a price threshold where I bail.…

As a thought-exercise -- assume models continue to improve, whereas "using claude-code daily" is something you choose to do because it's useful, but is not yet at the level of "absolute necessity, can't imagine work without it". What if it does become, that level of absolute necessity?

- Is your demand inelastic at that point, if having claude-code becomes effectively required, to sustain your livelihood? Does pricing continue to increase, until it's 1%/5%/20%/50% of your salary (because hey, what's the alternative? if you don't pay, then you won't keep up with other engineers and will just lose your job completely)?

- But if tools like claude-code become such a necessity, wouldn't enterprises be the ones paying? Maybe, but maybe like health-insurance in America (a uniquely dystopian thing), your employer may pay some portion of the premiums, but they'll also pass some costs to you as the employee... Tech salaries have been cushy for a while now, but we might be entering a "K-shaped" inflection point --> if you are an OpenAI elite researcher, then you might get a $100M+ offer from Meta; but if you are an average dev doing average enterprise CRUD, maybe your wages will be suppressed because the small cabal of LLM providers can raise prices and your company HAS to pay, which means you HAVE to bear the cost (or else what? you can quit and look for another job, but who's hiring?)

This is a pessimistic take of course (and vastly oversimplified / too cynical). A more positive outcome might be, that increasing quality of AI/LLM options leads to a democratization of talent, or a blossoming of "solo unicorns"... personally I have toyed with calling this, something like a "techno-Amish utopia", in the sense that Amish people believe in self-sufficiency and are not wholly-resistant to technology (it's actually quite clever, what sorts of technology they allow for themselves or not), so what if we could take that further?

If there was a version of that Amish-mentality of loosely-federated self-sufficient communities (they have newsletters! they travel to each other! but they largely feed themselves, build their own tools, fix their own fences, etc.!), where engineers + their chosen LLM partner could launch companies from home, manage their home automation / security tech, run a high-tech small farm, live off-grid from cheap solar, use excess electricity to Bitcoin mine if they choose to, etc.... maybe there is actually a libertarian world that can arise, where we are no longer as dependent on large institutions to marshal resources, deploy capital, scale production, etc., if some of those things are more in-reach for regular people in smaller communities, assisted by AI. This of course assumes that, the cabal of LLM model creators can be broken, that you don't need to pay for Claude if the cheaper open-source-ish Llama-like alternative is good enough

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#140
post #123

Wouldn't the sweet spot for MCP be where the LLM is able to do most of the heavy lifting on its own (outputting some kind of structured or unstructured output), but needs a bit of external/dynamic data that it can't do without? The list of MCP servers/tools it can use should nail that external lookup in a (mostly) deterministic way. This would work best if a human is the end consumer of this output, or will receive m…

You don't solve the problem of being able to rely on the agent to call the MCP. Hooks into the agent's execution lifecycle seem more reliable for deterministic behavior and supervision.

I agree. In any large backend software running on a server, it's the LLM invocation which would be a call out to an external system, and with proper validation around the results. At which point, calling an "MCP Server" is also just your backend software invoking one more library/service based on inspecting some part of the response from the LLM.

This doesn't take away from the utility of MCP when it comes Claude Desktop and the likes!

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