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Levels of Agentic Engineering

bassimeledath.com

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Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#141

Post by tracker1 »

ddxv wrote: post #108
krackers wrote: post #73

What level is copy pasting snippets into the chatgpt window? Grug brained level 0? I sort of prefer it that way (using it as an amped up stackoverflow) since it forces me to decompose things in terms of natural boundaries (manual context management as it were) and allows me to think in terms of "what properties do I need this function to have" rather than just letting copilot take the wheel and glob the entire projec…

I still do this too for tough projects in languages I know. Too many times getting burned thinking 'wow it one shot that!' only to end up debugging later. I let agents run wild on frontend JS because I don't know it well and trust them (and an output I can look at).

IMO, the front end results are REALLY hit and miss... I mostly use it to scaffold if I don't really care because the full UI is just there to test a component, or I do a fair amount of the work mixed. I wish it was better at working with some of the UI component libraries with mixed environments. Describing complex UX and having it work right are really not there yet.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#142

Post by ElFitz »

patchnull wrote: post #138
jessmartin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

strong agree. I always have the LLM put an actual markdown doc in a docs/plans/ folder before starting work. I often, but not always review it. Aside: it also helps for code review! Review bots can point out the diff between plan and implementation. Some examples for the curious: https://github.com/sociotechnica-org/symphony-ts/tree/main/d...

[flagged]

It's one of the things that surprised me when I first started using the compound engineering plugin.

I've been considering adding a review gate with a reviewing model solely tasked with identifying gaps between the plan and the implementation.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#144

Post by zem »

zenoprax wrote: post #29
holtkam2 wrote: post #27

Level 9: agent managers running agent teams Level 10: agent CEOs overseeing agent managers Level 11: agent board of directors overseeing the agent CEO Level 12: agent superintelligence - single entity doing everything Level 13: agent superagent, agenting agency agentically, in a loop, recursively, mega agent, agentic agent agent agency super AGI agent Level 14: A G E N T

Level 15 (if not succumbed to fatal context poisoning from malicious agent crime syndicate): Agents creating corporations to code agentic marketplaces in which to gamble their own crypto currencies until they crash the real economy of humans.

stross's "accelerando" has a bit about this. fun book.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#145

Post by ativzzz »

jessmartin wrote: post #135
ativzzz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite question is more prevalent, how much money have you spent?

Not a small amount :) I spend $140/mo on Anthropic + OpenAI subs and I use all my tokens all the time. I've started spending about $100/week on API credits, but I'd like to increase that.

Still waiting for these software factories to solve problems that aren't related to building software factories. I'm sure it'll happen sooner or later, but so far all the outputs of these "AI did this whole thing autonomously" are just tools to have AI build things autonomously. It's like a self reinforcing pyramid.

AI agents haven't yet figured out a way to do sales, marketing or customer support in a way that people want to pay them money.

Maybe that won't be necessary and instead the agent economy will be agents providing services for other agents.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#147

Post by mwcz »

vidimitrov wrote: post #26

Level 4 is where I see the most interesting design decisions get made, and also where most practitioners take a shortcut that compounds badly later. When the author talks about "codifying" lessons, the instinct for most people is to update the rules file. That works fine for conventions - naming patterns, library preferences, relatively stable stuff. But there's a different category of knowledge that rules files hand…

Is it a mad dream to wish that was never gets DOM access, and instead there is invented a less memory-hungry dynamic representation of web pages that's usable only by wasm? Yeah, it's a mad dream. But it's also maddening that I can effortlessly open a 100 MB PDF but browser can barely handle a 10 MB html document.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#148

Post by jochem9 »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #28
mzg wrote: post #7

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is u…

Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it

ASML has a near monopoly on the most advanced chip machines. They maintain that by 'just' being the most advanced and having lots of patents.

They haven't branched off into making chips themselves. They keep their focus on selling the factories.

I think they haven't, because ASML itself doesn't have production lines. Every machine is one off. It even gets delivered with a team of engineers to keep it running.

The same probably holds true for software factories: the best ones are assembled by the smartest people (wielding AI in ways most of us don't). They are not in the business to produce software at scale, they are in the business to ensure others can do that using increasingly advanced software factories.

This relies on the premise that such a factory cannot produce a more advanced factory without significant human intervention (e.g. high ingenuity and/or lots of elbow grease). If this doesn't hold true, then we are in for some interesting times x100.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#149

Post by solarkraft »

svstoyanovv wrote: post #62
solarkraft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still an insightful and well written comment, but the LLM-ness does make me wonder whether this part was actually human-intended or just LLM filler: > The discipline to do it consistently enough that agents can actually retrieve and use it is what's missing, and structuring it for that purpose is genuinely underexplored territory Because I somewhat agree that discipline may be missing, but I don’t believe it to…

Suppose you spend months deeply researching a niche topic. You make your own discoveries, structure your own insights, and feed all of this tightly curated, highly specific context into an LLM. You essentially build a custom knowledge base and train the model on your exact mental framework. Is this fundamentally different from using a ghostwriter, an editor, or a highly advanced compiler? If I am doing the heavy lift…

I really don’t mind this in principle (in fact it could help me out a lot). The problem is that the LLM often skews meaning by making up filler-phrases and it becomes hard to tell what you actually mean and what your LLM made up.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#150

Post by svstoyanovv »

solarkraft wrote: post #149
svstoyanovv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you spend months deeply researching a niche topic. You make your own discoveries, structure your own insights, and feed all of this tightly curated, highly specific context into an LLM. You essentially build a custom knowledge base and train the model on your exact mental framework. Is this fundamentally different from using a ghostwriter, an editor, or a highly advanced compiler? If I am doing the heavy lift…

I really don’t mind this in principle (in fact it could help me out a lot). The problem is that the LLM often skews meaning by making up filler-phrases and it becomes hard to tell what you actually mean and what your LLM made up.

Yeah, you need to be aware of hallucinations for sure. Today, for example, I was doing my one linear, I've used all the curated knowledge to make some structure to it, see examples of deep research, brainstorm ideas around it, but I am the verifier and the steerer. 99% of the ideas were total BS IMO, but it inspired me on wording, what to use, and how to combine them to achieve something simple and understandable.

One idea that I haven't tried but will do is to create a soul.md dumping my writing style, etc.. to see the result (which will be an interesting experiment)

But if you think about it, LLM's are good on generic stuff, then you start curating context, you start using context engineering to structure and give form to that context, but then this is your expertise, your knowledge, and your insights. (if they are not synthetics tho) So now you have something tailored to your needs, something that can be used for brainstorming, idea generation, filtration, (if we see this as a pyramid starting from the most expanded and generic, going to specifics and things that only you can take and merge as solutions on your mental main branch). So now you have data, knowledge, which is feeding and training the responses that will be generated for you for the current session, by the LLM, and maybe with the harness as well(they are not doing a great job so far in being real connectors).

Of course, we are away from AI taking and working on autopilot with my knowledge, but now I have become faster at: generating ideas, forming new knowledge, testing it, verifying it, deciding if this will be something synthetic or should I go deeper to discover more & explore the cases of it to form a new deep connection.

So, is this something that I used LLM just to generate the content for me? Or have i amplified myself and used LLM to structure the response, (maybe if this is not my primary language and I need to use it in order to form more in-depth sentences)?

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