Is there a name for this style of writing? Where it's composed exclusively of simple sentences. Short and punchy. Paragraphs with just a single sentence. I know it's associated with LLM writing. This article probably wasn't written by an LLM. But still. It has a kind of rhythm to it. Like poetry. But poetry designed to put me to sleep.
Arguing with Agents
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Arguing with Agents
#22Remember when programming was fun? To me, after the novelty of seeing a computer program execute (more or less) what I ask in plain English wears off, what’s left is the chore of managing a bunch of annoying bots. I don’t know yet if we’re more productive or not, if the resulting code is as good. But the craft in itself is completely different, much more akin to product managing, psychology, which I never enjoyed as…
It's micromanaging an idiot savant. Except the fun part of management, the reward for a job well done, is seeing the personal growth of the managee.
In this case, there's no person to grow. It's an overly talkative calculator.
I never expected to see this number of engineers aspiring to emulate Dilbert's pointy haired boss.
Re: Arguing with Agents
#23I recently came across this presentation https://youtu.be/QxkRf-xSfgI , and it changed my view of AI quite significantly. (There is also a paper https://arxiv.org/html/2510.12066v2 .) The fundamental idea is that "intelligence" really means trying to shorten the time to figure out something. So it's a tradeoff, not a quality. And AI agents are doing it. Therefore, if that perspective is right, the issues that the OP…
CEOs beat geniuses in the real world because they often have other pathologies, like enough moral flexibility to ignore the externalities of their profit centers.
I'd also argue there's some training bias in the performance, it's not just smart shortcuts... Claude especially seems prone to getting into a 'wrap it up' mode even when the plan is only half way completed and starts deferring rather than completing tasks.
Re: Arguing with Agents
#24The article looks like an AI generated novel to me. So I didn't bother reading it in detail. But I see telltale signs of long conversations leading to the agent cutting corners. To the author (and those who write novel-like blogs): I suggest publishing the raw prompt you used to generate such slop instead. We'll have more respect for you if you respect the reader's time.
It probably still took way more time to write than it did to read.
It's also kind-of their point that they find the information delivery more important than the prose; they're leaning into their situation :-D
Re: Arguing with Agents
#25This is very well written and told. It’s worth reading all the way through. > If you try to refute it, you’ll just get another confabulation. > Not because the model is lying to you on purpose, and not because it’s “resistant” or “defensive” in the way a human might be. It’s because the explanation isn’t connected to anything that could be refuted. There is no underlying mental state that generated “I sensed pressure…
Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 Do not argue with the LLM, for it is subtle and quick to anger, and finds you crunchy with ketchup. These are, broadly, all context management issues - when you see it start to go off track, it's because it has too much, too little, or the wrong context, and you have to fix that, usually by resetting it and priming it correctly the next time. This is why it'…
Exactly, never argue with an LLM unless the debate is the point...
It's just speedrunning context rot.
Re: Arguing with Agents
#26[dead]
Re: Arguing with Agents
#27> I queued the work and let it run. First task came back good. Second came back good. Somewhere around hour four the quality started sliding. By hour six the agent was cutting corners I’d specifically told it not to cut, skipping steps I’d explicitly listed, behaving like I’d never written any of the rules down. > … > When I write a prompt, the agent doesn’t just read the words. It reads the shape. A short casual que…
It's more than context-rot.
If you ask a vague ignorant question, you get back authoritative summaries. If you make specific request, each statement is taken literally. The quality of the answer depends on the quality of the question.
And I'm not using "quality" to mean good/bad. I mean literally qualitative, not quantifiable. Tone. Affect. Personality. Whatever you call it. Your input tokens shape the pattern of the output tokens. It's a model of human language, is that really so surprising?
Re: Arguing with Agents
#28Is there a name for this style of writing? Where it's composed exclusively of simple sentences. Short and punchy. Paragraphs with just a single sentence. I know it's associated with LLM writing. This article probably wasn't written by an LLM. But still. It has a kind of rhythm to it. Like poetry. But poetry designed to put me to sleep.
it's written by LLM
Yes, this was super annoying to read. It was some core ideas and it was expanded into a way too long essay that boiled down to this guy doesn't know how to run agents.
Re: Arguing with Agents
#29This is very well written and told. It’s worth reading all the way through. > If you try to refute it, you’ll just get another confabulation. > Not because the model is lying to you on purpose, and not because it’s “resistant” or “defensive” in the way a human might be. It’s because the explanation isn’t connected to anything that could be refuted. There is no underlying mental state that generated “I sensed pressure…
Very well written? It’s a bunch of AI generated stuff around an interesting point. It repeats its points over and over again, meanders. It’s an interesting thesis, it’s not well written or well told
This was my reading too. Interesting idea, but it took 10 pages of fluff to get to it and I didn't even believe the final idea when we got there. I started off reading the first part and thought he would get to the part where he realized he was managing context wrong. Never got there, instead he thought it was about the shape of the prompt.
Re: Arguing with Agents
#30Remember when programming was fun? To me, after the novelty of seeing a computer program execute (more or less) what I ask in plain English wears off, what’s left is the chore of managing a bunch of annoying bots. I don’t know yet if we’re more productive or not, if the resulting code is as good. But the craft in itself is completely different, much more akin to product managing, psychology, which I never enjoyed as…
> I can imagine a future in which some or even most software is developed by witches, who construct elaborate summoning environments, repeat special incantations (“ALWAYS run the tests!”), and invoke LLM daemons who write software on their behalf. These daemons may be fickle, sometimes destroying one’s computer or introducing security bugs, but the witches may develop an entire body of folk knowledge around prompting them effectively—the fabled “prompt engineering”. Skills files are spellbooks.
https://aphyr.com/posts/418-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...