Seems like the agent takes a lot of liberties when it comes to porting stuff: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Arepomirrorhq%2Fbetter-use...
None of these issues seem to be documented outside these files.
We put a coding agent in a while loop
171–180 of 317 posts
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#172Now I want to put one of these in a loop, give it access to some bitcoin, and tell it to come up with a viable strategy to become a billionaire within the next month.
Tell it to implement the strategy.
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#173I'm curious: does Typescript make sense as a language for machines?
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#174There 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…
Foxpro, the horror
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not for an old project, but if you've talked AI through building something, you've also told it "nah let's not change the interface" and similar decisions, which will sit in the context.
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The prevailing counter narrative around vibe coding seems to be that "code output isn't the bottle neck, understanding the problem is". But shouldn't that make vibe coding a good tool for the tool belt? Use it to understand the outermost layer of the problem, then throw out the code and write a proper solution.
> [create prototype], then throw out the code and write a proper solution. Problem is, that in everyones' experience, this almost never happens. The prototype is declared "good enough, just needs a few small adjustments", rewrite is declared too expensive, too time-consuming. And crap goes to production.
Watching was supposed to be a prototype become the production code is one of the most constant themes of my 20 year career
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stoicism. Dichotomy of control. Is this something you can control? If no, don’t dread. If yes, do something. Often, all you have firmly in your grasp are things inside of your brain. Catch the negative thought. Acknowledge it. Move on. Do not dwell. Take proactive steps to be ready in your career. You do tech ling enough and you live through multiple cycles like this.
I kind of want to do something to stop it though. It feels like not doing something is a betrayal of all that's good in the world, staying mildly by while evil is happening just in front of us. With collective action and targeted scorn we might be able to prevent these abominations from becoming commonplace. At the same time, I know that the more people go for this approach, the more work there will be for me to fix…
I can relate to your frustration.
This future is being forced on humanity by pluto/megalomaniacs who are gaslighting everyone into believing that this technology will be a net improvement to our lives. Meanwhile, the truth is that only those in power will benefit from it, and the benefit to humanity as a whole is very much in question, even by optimistic criteria. If you adopt a slightly realistic viewpoint, let alone pessimistic, you'll realize that the track record of these people is abysmal. They will lie, cheat, and steal their way into ensuring their own prosperity, while the rest of the world burns for all they care. The fact their actions are rarely if ever regulated by governments with the severity they should be, and that they're increasingly taking positions of actual political power, should scare the living daylights out of any sane person.
I don't know what the solution to this is, but I'm increasingly leaning towards going completely off grid and checking out from society. Even if this path doesn't result in our literal annihilation, it will have similar practical effects for the vast majority of humanity.
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#178Does anyone else get dull feelings of dread reading this kind of thing? How do you combat it?
Try actually doing it, realise how very far the outcome is from what the blog posts describe the vast majority of the time, and get dread from the state of (social) media instead.
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#179Earlier 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…
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 det…
Nice. Any chance you could put in some attributions and credits in your paper? https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3955-9994
Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop
#180> 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…
> 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. Is that... the first recorded instance of an AI committing suicide?
Probably the second. I first discovered this around about March. It's kind of hilarious.