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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#181

Post by ghuntley »

ath3nd wrote: post #159
ghuntley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets kind of philosophical really fast. What does it mean when software can be automated through a bash loop? (Not to 100%, to 80%. What does that mean to software outsourcing in the consulting industry?)

[flagged]

Yeah, I totally get it man. Like when I discovered these techniques back in February, it really spooked me. And I guess 5-6 months later it's starting to become known even though I've been publishing full details on how to do this shit. It turns out that the best way to spread knowledge in San Francisco is to get drunk with YC founders...

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#182

Post by danielbln »

aitchnyu wrote: post #128
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There 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…

Do we have a method to let AI analyze the data within the DBs and figure out how to port it to a well designed db? I'm a fan of the philosophy of write strong data structures and stupid algorithms around them, your data will outlive your application, etc. Simple example is a Mongodb field which stores same thing as int or string, relationships without foreign keys in Postgres etc. Then frustrating shit like somebody…

"Claude, connect to DB A via FOO and analyze the data, then figure out to to port it to well designed DB B, come back to me with a proposal and implementation plan"

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#183

Post by ghuntley »

spion wrote: post #178
rogerrogerr wrote: post #45

Does 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.

Yes, but the cooked thing is you just run more loops with the right prompts and you can resolve defective outcomes. It's terrifying

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#184

Post by phito »

ath3nd wrote: post #156
phito wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are LLMs better or worse at security than a team full of fresh graduates?

Far far far far worse.

In my experience, LLMs do not make a lot of the security mistakes most developers do, just because it is aware of their existence while most devs just are not. But then they could also make the mistake at some point, and the vibe coder guiding it might not catch it... Do you have any examples? I find this really interesting.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#185

Post by ddingus »

ssss11 wrote: post #174
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There 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

This whole discussion is blowing my mind!

When I hit your comment:

1. I thought, "YES! Indeed!"

2. Then, "For Sale: Baby Shoes."

3. The similar feel caused me to do a rethink on all this. We are moving REALLY fast!

Nice comment

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#186

Post by acdha »

phito wrote: post #184
ath3nd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far far far far worse.

In my experience, LLMs do not make a lot of the security mistakes most developers do, just because it is aware of their existence while most devs just are not. But then they could also make the mistake at some point, and the vibe coder guiding it might not catch it... Do you have any examples? I find this really interesting.

LLMs aren’t aware of anything - that’s pareidolia of intelligence – but they hopefully have been trained on code which has more secure than insecure code. That’ll help with some classes of problem like using string operations to make database queries but it does have the cost that people might not review it as deeply for more subtle problems.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#187

Post by ghuntley »

precompute wrote: post #71
rozab wrote: post #61

These people are weird. The blog post that inspired this has this weird iMessage screenshot, like a shitty investment grift facebook ad: https://ghuntley.com/ralph/ Apparently one of the lucky few who learned this special technique from Geoff just completed a $50k contract for $297. But that's not all! Geoff is generous to share the special secret prompt that unlocked this unbelievable success, if only we subscribe t…

It's grifting, plain and simple. And that blog is atrocious, high noise-to-signal and repulsive, AI-generated everything.

And yet, the original post, which has been on the front page of Hacker News for 18 hours, is based on techniques from my blog that you're degrading.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#188

Post by Syntaf »

dhorthy wrote: post #29
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

There 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…

When Claude starts deploying Kafka clusters I’m outro

I allowed Claude to debug an ingress rule issue on my cluster last week for a membership platform I run.

Not really the same since Claude didn’t deploy anything — but I WAS surprised at how well it tracked down the ingress issue to a cron job accidentally labeled as a web pod (and attempting to service http requests).

It actually prompted me to patch the cron itself but I don’t think I’m that bullish yet to let CC patch my cluster.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#189

Post by billylo »

stevage wrote: post #109

It'd be pretty interesting to do this with no predermined goal. Get ai to find a project to work on,zand just work on it for a while until it thinks it's done, then start on the next one.

Great idea. And host them on github-next-2025.com or maybe use it as a new benchmark to see how models/tools progress.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#190

Post by billylo »

rane wrote: post #149
andyferris wrote: post #95

People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot, or that GPT5 can solve a problem that Gemini 2.5 Pro cannot, or that Sonnet 4 can solve some problem that GPT5 cannot. There was a blog article about mixing together different agents into the same conversation, taking turns at responses and improving results/correctness. But it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone…

> People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot Most definitely can. It's insane how well just telling Claude to ask help from Gemini works in practice. https://github.com/raine/consult-llm-mcp Disclaimer: made it

Thank you. Will try it today.
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