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Tools: Code Is All You Need

lucumr.pocoo.org

141–150 of 234 posts

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#141
post #46

> It demands too much context. This is solved trivially by having default initial prompts. All majors tools like Claude Code or Gemini CLI have ways to set them up. > You pass all your tools to an LLM and ask it to filter it down based on the task at hand. So far, there hasn't been much better approaches proposed. Why is a "better" approach needed? If modern LLMs can properly figure it out? It's not like LLMs don't k…

> 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/…

Fair. I'm using Claude Code which is pay as you go. The Market will probably do its things. (The company pays anyway obviously)

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#142
tl;dr of one of today’s AI posts: all you need is code generation

It’s 2025 and this is the epitome of progress.

On the positive side code generation can be solid if you also have/can generate easy-to-read validation or tests for the generated code. I mean that you can read, of course.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#143
post #54

My absolute favorite use of MCP so far is Bruce Hauman's clojure-mcp. In short, it gives the LLM (a) a bash tool, (b) a persistent Clojure REPL, and (c) structural editing tools. The effect is that it's far more efficient at editing Clojure code than any purely string-diff-based approach, and if you write a good test suite it can rapidly iterate back and forth just editing files, reloading them, and then re-running t…

I was just going to comment about clojure-mcp!! It’s far and away the coolest use of mcp I’ve seen so far.

It can straight up debug your code, eval individual expressions, document return types of functions. It’s amazing.

It actually makes me think that languages with strong REPLs are a better for languages than those without. Seeing clojure-mcp do its thing is the most impressive AI feat I’ve seen since I saw GPT-3 in action for the first time

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#144
post #125
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local models aren't quite good enough for this yet in my experience - the big hosted models (o3, Gemini 2.5, Claude 4) only just crossed the capability threshold for this to start working well. I think it's possible we'll see a local model that can do this well within the next few months though - it needs good tool calling, not an encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Might be possible to fit that in a model that…

> it needs good tool calling, not an encyclopedic knowledge of the world I wonder if there are any groups/companies out there building something like this Would love to have models that only know 1 or 2 languages (eg. python + js), but are great at them and at tool calling. Definitely don't need my coding agent to know all of Wikipedia and translating between 10 different languages

Given 2 datasets:

1. A special code dataset 2. A bunch of "unrelated" books

My understanding is that the model trained on just the first will never beat the model trained on both. Bloomberg model is my favorite example of this.

If you can squirell away special data then that special data plus everything else will beat the any other models. But that's basically what openai, google, and anthropic are all currently doing.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#145
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As is well known, AI is whatever hasn't been done yet.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script. 99.9% of my 20-year career has been spent on Windows. So bash scripts are entirely worthless and dead to me.

If you use git on Windows, bash is normally available. Agree, that this isn't widely used though.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#147
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pricin…

Well my business doesn't rely on AI as a competitive advantage, at least not yet anyways. So as it stands, if claude got 100x as effective, but cost 100x more, I'm not sure I could justify the cost because my market might just not be large enough. Which means I can either ditch it (for an alternative if one exists) or expand into other markets... which is appealing but a huge change from what I'm currently doing.

As usual, the answer is "it depends". I guarantee though that I'll at least start looking at alternatives when there's a huge price hike.

Also I suspect that a 100x improvement (if even possible) wouldn't just cost 100 times as much, but probably 100,000+ times as much. I also suspect than an improvement of 100x will be hyped as an improvement of 1,000x at least :)

Regardless, AI is really looking like a commodity to me. While I'm thankful for all the investment that got us here, I doubt anyone investing this late in the game at these inflated numbers are going to see a long term return (other than ponzi selling).

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#148

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.

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.

Aren’t people building DIY drones that are close to and in some cases superior to off the shelf Chinese drones?

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I said as concerns the economics. It's clearly more popular than the Oculus or whatever, but it's still a money bonfire and shows no signs of changing on that front.

LLMs as we know them via ChatGPT were a way to disrupt the search monopoly Google had for so many years. And my guess is the reason Google was in no rush to jump into that market was because they knew the economics of it sucked.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#150

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…

This is cool! Also have found the Playwright MCP implementation to be overkill and think of it more as a reference to an opinionated subset of the Playwright API.

LinkedIn has this reputation of being notorious about making it hard to build automations on top of, did you run into any roadblocks when building your personal LinkedIn agent?

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