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Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#171

Post by troupo »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #142
Bluestein wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feb/April was peak for code.-

Wasn't this during the period where they had a bunch of bugs around caching and the models were making loads of weird decisions? I honestly feel like basically nobody knows anything about these models, it's all just vibes (and I'm no different).

Anthropic broke their models in spring, denied it, gaslighted everyone who said so, and then all but admitted it: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem (basically doing Anthropic things).

> I honestly feel like basically nobody knows anything about these models, it's all just vibes

This, too. Since only providers know what they actually serve, what they change and what limits they impose.

There are some visible degradations though. E.g. Claude-ish.

As for a personal anecdote: around February I created a rather complex quiz web app for myself and friends with multiple question types, sync between screens, multiple media upload types, multiple scoring and timing types, MC inetrface etc. etc. etc. It took me a week or so in the evenings with rather vague prompts to make it.

Now Claude (and Codex) cannot reliably build a much simpler web app even with precise instructions while also maintaining the visual consistency.

But I will agree with you, it's a feeling, not a precise measurement.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#172

Post by Arathorn »

On the point of

> speaking of weird: how is it that these models, in a sandbox, with supposedly no way to communicate with other agents, manage to find the same public wikis as a scratch pad for agent communication?

It feels somewhat plausible that they're defaulting to the same search and picking the same top result?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#173

Post by nchie »

taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

For my side project where uptime doesn't really matter but the codebase is quite huge (gamedev of a multiplayer game with Bevy, so both server code, game code, content build pipeline, as well as a TON of editor and authoring code, probably 150k+ LoC), I've been moving towards just reviewing boundaries between modules, APIs, and schemas, and I'm pushing towards keeping things as modular as possible. If something ends up wrong, it going to be isolated and it doesn't infect the rest of the codebase. Every now and then I zoom into a module and tidy it up (or even rewrite it).

I wouldn't dare doing this "carelessly" for anything where people other than me actually depend on it, but you can move very fast while doing it and the risks with bad code is quite hedged. Different modules can mature at different rates when it becomes necessary.

Maybe not related to all of what you were saying, but I think this enables scaling without ending up with progress grinding down to a halt due to shitty code.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#174

Post by troupo »

globular-toast wrote: post #134
troupo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of simply saying 'implement themes in my product' you need to be specific, in fact more specific than usual. Around February you could get away with very vague prompts to Claude. I feel like models have regressed since

Probably because you were impressed by whatever it produced to fill in the gaps at the time. But if you expect the models to read your mind you're going to have a bad time.

I constantly do various greenfield side projects for myself and friends.

I feel like need much more precise instructions much earlier in the process now than when I was building in February.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#175

Post by recursivecaveat »

IceDane wrote: post #56
idiliv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "compilers argument"?

Lots of really silly people love to compare LLMs to compilers. "You don't look at the compiled code either" and "Back in the day, people also had negative reactions to compilers and wanted to keep writing assembly by hand" and other such nonsense.

Indeed, the compiler does not have to ingest its own output, figure it out, and insert modifications in the middle. Source code is the medium that LLMs work in.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#176

Post by 0xpgm »

_usefulcat wrote: post #110

I'd like to submit my counterpoint. I work on an established codebase building new features and fixing bugs. It has access to our story board, git and a couple of other mcps. As long as the story is well written with clear requirements and expectations it always produces quality code that I validate as a human with a variety of tests automated and manual. I peer review the code. My colleagues then peer review that to…

I don't think this is a counterpoint.

An established codebase is already the best kind of context you could give an agent. It has all the patterns baked in so the agent simply follows established patterns. Such a codebase probably contains tens to hundreds of thousands of man-hours poured into it by humans refining it to do what it does - taking into account real world feedback and constraints.

When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#177

Post by aytigra »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #124
codingisfreedom wrote: post #43

I’ve asked Astra to build me an app for a prototype I created quickly using Sonnet. It’s been 2 days and it made no real progress on the actual app. It created docs, scripts, workflows, and it’s doing a bunch of reviewing on every PR. I told it that I just need an MVP. I’m pretty sure an average senior engineer would have finished that task much quicker, and guaranteed with more readable, higher-quality code. Meanwhi…

I don't know how to make apps or evaluate code, but with astra I having been making an iOS app on my own for the first time and it's going great. my app is not terribly complex but requires using bluetooth and other intricacies which I thought would be tough. but it's going really well. I'm not asking it to one-shot it though, I'm going feature by feature, testing and building up. yes, at first it would run simulator…

I've been making a macos app with opus 4.8-5 and at first it was great, everything materialized in a week, but when I started tuning stuff and fixing performance problems I have spent a very frustrating month refactoring code where I had to constantly catch llm red-handed and explain and sometimes push obvious ways how to make things work properly (a general knowledge from a completely different stack). In the process CLAUDE.md and memory grew exponentially explaining what it should and what it should never do.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#179

Post by thewhitetulip »

> Maybe it’s objectively good for a codebase that is entirely written by agents and only needs to be understood by agents.

Yeah that's what they're aiming for. This is why codex and claude code probably doesn't have cursor like editor window. They don't want humans to read and write code

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#180

Post by sensanaty »

Arathorn wrote: post #172

On the point of > speaking of weird: how is it that these models, in a sandbox, with supposedly no way to communicate with other agents, manage to find the same public wikis as a scratch pad for agent communication? It feels somewhat plausible that they're defaulting to the same search and picking the same top result?

I think it's more like the first agent in the chain makes a text doc somewhere on the system with instructions like "Leave documentation at XYZ.com" which the subsequent agents are reading and running. When you strip away all the sci-fi doom talk from the marketing of what happened, it all boils down to stuff like that, the agents wrote a text file that was read by other agents.
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