151–160 of 242 posts
I am not ashamed to admit this whole agentic coding movement has moved beyond me. Not only do I have know everything about the code, data and domain, but now I need to understand this whole AI system which is a meta skill of its own. I fear I may never be able catch up till someone comes along and simplifies it for pleb consumption.
Just give it a few months. If some technics really work, it’ll get streamlined.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're getting at is the heart of the problem with the LLM hype train though, isn't it? "We should have rigorous evaluations of whether or not [thing] works." seems like an incredibly obvious thought. But in the realm of LLM-enabled use cases they're also expensive . You'd need to recruit dozens, perhaps even hundreds of developers to do this, with extensive observation and rating of the results. So rather than…
Before you get into the expensive part, how do you get past "non-deterministic blackbox with unknown layers in between imposed by vendors"
You absolutely can quantify the results of a chaotic black box, in the same way you can quantify the bias of a loaded die without examining its molecular structure.
> It made sense to me that the persuasion principles I learned in Robert Cialdini's Influence would work when applied to LLMs. And I was pleased that they did. No, no. Stop. What is this? What're we doing here? This goes past developping with AI into something completely different. Just because AI coding is a radical shift doesn't mean everything has changed. There needs to be some semblance of structure and design.…
Maybe not in this case.
For the AI to create a solution, it has to come up with a vector for your intention and goals. It makes some sense for an AI trained on human persuasion materials (basically, everything has a rhetorical aspect) to also track human persuasion features for intentions.
However, results will vary. Just as people trying to deploy rhetorical techniques (and ridiculous power stances) often come off as foolish, I believe trying to hack your intention vector with all-caps and super-superlatives won't always work as intended (pun intended).
Still, if you find yourself not getting what you want, and you check your prompt and find some persuasion feature missing (e.g., authority), I think it's worth trying to add something on point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A software engineer would never just slop out an entire feature based on the first discussion with a stakeholder and then expect the stakeholder to continuously refine their statement until the right thing is slopped out. That's just not how it works and it makes very little sense. Didn’t you just describe Agile?
Who hurt you? Sorry couldn’t resist. Agile’s point was getting feedback during the process rather than after something is complete enough to be shipped thus minimizing risk and avoiding wasted effort. Instead people are splitting up major projects into tiny shippable features and calling that agile while missing the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Important: there is a lot of human coding, too. I'm not highlighting this to gloat or to prove a point. If anything in the past I have underestimated how big LLMs were going to be. Anyone so inclined can take the chance to point and laugh at how stupid and wrong that was. Done? Great. I don't think I've been intentionally avoiding coding assistants and as a matter of fact I have been using Claude Code since the lit…
Yeah, my current opinion on this is that AI tools make development harder work . You can get big productivity boosts out of them but you have to be working at the top of your game - I often find I'm mentally exhausted after just a couple of hours.
P.s. always thought you were one of those irrational AI bros. Later, found that you were super reasonable. That's the way it should be. And thank you!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.
I like writing software. I hate managing people. What are we doing?
> The first time we played this game, Claude told me that the subagents had gotten a perfect score. After a bit of prodding, I discovered that Claude was quizzing the subagents like they were on a gameshow. This was less than useful. I asked to switch to realistic scenarios that put pressure on the agents, to better simulate what they might actually do.
Also his Claude says shit a lot