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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

#141

Post by miohtama »

heavyset_go wrote: post #48
ghuntley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - weird copyright / IP questions all around. This will be a minefield. Yeah, we're in weird territory because you can drive an LLM as a Bitcoin mixer over intellectual property. That's the entire point/meaning behind https://ghuntley.com/z80 . You can take something that exists, distill it back to specs, and then you've got your own IP. Throw away the tainted IP, and then just run Ralph over a loop. You are able to…

> then you've got your own IP. AI output isn't copyrighted in the US.

He is referring to taking AI output and making it your company's property.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#142

Post by divan »

bwestergard wrote: post #26

There are always two major results from any software development process: a change in the code and a change in cognition for the people who wrote the code (whether they did so directly or with an LLM). Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat th…

I used the "map is not a territory" to describe this context in the article about visual programming [0]. Code is a map, territory is the mental model of the problem domain the code is supposed to be solving.

But, as other commentators mentioned, LLMs are so much better on reading large codebases, that it even invalidates the whole idea of this post (visualizing codebase in 3D in a fashion similar how I would do it in my head). Which kinda changes the game – if "comprehending" complex codebase becomes an easy task, maybe we won't need to keep developers' mental models and the code in constant sync. (it's an open question)

[0] https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go/

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#145

Post by gf000 »

doug_durham wrote: post #74
bwestergard wrote: post #26

There are always two major results from any software development process: a change in the code and a change in cognition for the people who wrote the code (whether they did so directly or with an LLM). Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat th…

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…

Well, according to the recently linked Naur paper, the mental model for a codebase includes just as much what code wasn't written, as much what was - e.g. a decision to do this design over another, etc. This is not recoverable by AI without every meeting note and interaction between the devs/clients/etc.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#146

Post by whs »

ghuntley wrote: post #17
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…

> - weird copyright / IP questions all around. This will be a minefield. Yeah, we're in weird territory because you can drive an LLM as a Bitcoin mixer over intellectual property. That's the entire point/meaning behind https://ghuntley.com/z80 . You can take something that exists, distill it back to specs, and then you've got your own IP. Throw away the tainted IP, and then just run Ralph over a loop. You are able to…

I wrote an MCP based on that technique - https://github.com/whs/mcp-chinesewall

Basically to avoid the ambiguity of training LLM from unlicensed code, I use it to generate description of the code to another LLM trained from permissively licensed code. (There aren't any usable public domain models I've found)

I use it in real world and it seems that the codegen model work 10-20% of the time (the description is not detailed enough - which is good for "clean room" but a base model couldn't follow that). All models can review the code, retry and write its own implementation based on the codegen result though.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#148

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

> and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

This will be the big counter to AI generated tools; at one point they become black boxes and the only thing people can do is to try and fix them or replace them altogether.

Of course, in theory, AI tooling will only improve; today's vibe coded software that in some cases generate revenue can be fed into the models of the future and improved upon. In theory.

Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#149

Post by rane »

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…

> People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot

Most definitely can. It's insane how well just telling Claude to ask help from Gemini works in practice.

https://github.com/raine/consult-llm-mcp

Disclaimer: made it

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#150

Post by torginus »

ofjcihen wrote: post #97

As a security professional who makes most of my money from helping companies recover from vibe coded tragedies this puts Looney Toons style dollar signs in my eyes. Please continue.

Since the entire concept of Vibe Coding existed for a grand total of 5 months, how do companies reach the level of saturation with vibe coding, that it's not only prevalent, but makes sense to specialize in helping them recover from it?
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