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AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

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Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#142

Post by johnfn »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #136
johnfn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These students are making a tradeoff between an abstract notion of "cheating themselves" and a very concrete notion of "having a worse GPA". The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.

Not really. If they got admitted to Stanford to begin with, they are smart enough to succeed if they put in the work. So what they are actually trading off against is "I don't want to do the work", which is far less defensible than your reading of the situation.

You are conflating some abstract notion of "succeed"ing (what does that even mean, how can I measure it to two decimal places?) with a very concrete notion of "do this simple thing or get a worse GPA".

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#144

Post by bob1029 »

aaaronic wrote: post #60

I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models). I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do…

I like to think of the initial system prompt as a fuse or bootloader. The user prompt and feedback from tool execution are where most of the alignment comes from in multi-turn use. You want to point the agent in the right direction and then get the hell out of its way.

If your agent isn't performing as expected but can otherwise see and describe the tools as you expect, your mental model of what the tools should be is probably wrong. Adjusting the system prompt can address this, but it quickly bloats and starts to turn into a game of whack-a-mole.

I've got an agent that talks to a very large data warehouse and the system prompt is somewhere around 100 tokens. Most of the important information lives in the user's request and in the environment.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#148

Post by ninkendo »

johnfn wrote: post #126
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that they are cheating themselves. Unfortunately, a bunch of 18-22 year olds also don't tend to have the maturity to realize that fact. I imagine that the university is trying to nudge them to do the courses in a way that helps themselves because they know otherwise the students won't be wise enough to do that.

These students are making a tradeoff between an abstract notion of "cheating themselves" and a very concrete notion of "having a worse GPA". The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.

> The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.

I was never asked for my GPA when I first went into the industry. I never put it on my resume and it never even came up. After a decade or so of interviewing candidates, many of whom were recent graduates, I don’t recall any that put their GPA on their resume, and I obviously never cared about it either. Maybe the recruiters did, I dunno.

I’m a data point of one, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s clear and obvious at all that GPA translates to job prospects. At least not in tech.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#149

Post by brabel »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132
aaaronic wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I have a 16 year old who yells "chat" often enough when online gaming to be familiar with that use. I'm positive these students did use an LLM to get the help instead of crowdsourcing, but it is an interesting linguistic overlap. And while I'm on my "old man" soapbox -- "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people. I corrected my son for years before I started hearing colle…

> "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people It wouldn't actually be necessary for the phrase "look it up" to exist for this to happen. You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides. Compare rustle up, turn up, etc. You might also want to take note of the episode of Kim Possible where Ron is unsatisfied with…

> You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides.

I have been speaking English for 20 years but it's my second language. I don't think the semantics of "up" matters when I try to understand phrasal verbs like "turn up". I don't see anything about "up" (as in a direction) in "turn up" or "show up" when it means "to appear" or "to be discovered"... where is the semantic connection?? I think native English speakers just think "up" intrinsically relates to "appear" or "be found" but there's no such connection in other languages I know of.

Similarly with things like "fed up" (as in 'tired of'). Where is the "upness" here?

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#150

Post by harrisi »

danielrmay wrote: post #141

When reading this I'm reminded of Charles Petzold's 2005 article "Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?". https://www.charlespetzold.com/etcetera/DoesVisualStudioRotT...

I know who Petzold is but I can't remember if I read this at the time. I do love it though. I was thinking a lot about generated code in Visual Studio a couple years after this article.

It's kinda funny to think about various forms of code generation. From compilers to IDEs to parser generators to, now, LLMs. Even several higher level languages that compile to lower level languages are generative, essentially.

Still not a fan of LLMs, but it's always a good to remember that the concept isn't entirely new or unique.

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