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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#211

Post by timr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #196
recroad wrote: post #83

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…

> Am I supposed to be impressed by this? No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.) From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cas…

> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

Only if you ignore everything they generate. Look at all the comments saying that the agent hallucinates a result, generates always-passing tests, etc. Those are absolutely true observations -- and don't touch on the fact that tests can pass, the red/green approach can give thumbs up and rocket emojis all day long, and the code can still be shitty, brittle and riddled with security and performance flaws. And so now we have people building elaborate castles in the sky to try to catch those problems. Except that the things doing the catching are themselves prone to hallucination. And around we go.

So because a portion of (IMO always bad, but previously unrecognized as bad) coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level. There's more output, certainly, but it all feels like we've replaced actual intelligent thought with an army of monkeys making Rube Goldberg machines at scale. It's going to backfire.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#212

Post by tudelo »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #144
recroad wrote: post #83

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…

Yes I'm still not really understanding this "run agents overnight" thing. Most of the time if I use claude it's done in 5-20 minutes. I've never wanted to have work done for me overnight...tomorrow is already plenty of time for more work, it's not going anywhere, and my employer isn't paying me to produce overnight.

The only counter I have to this is that there are some workflows that have test environments, everything can't or shouldn't just run locally. Sometimes these test take time, and instead of babysitting the model to write code and run the build+deploy+test manually, you can send it off to work until the kinks are worked out.

Add to that I have worked on many projects that take more than 20 minutes to fully build and run tests... unfortunately. And I would consider that part of the job of implementing a feature, and to reduce cycles I have to take.

After the "green" signal I will manually review or send off some secondary reviews in other models. Is it wasteful? Probably. But its pretty damn fun (as long as I ignore the elephant in the room.)

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#213

Post by the_lonely_time »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #209
jack_pp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what in God's Name could you do in PHP that you can't do in a modern framework?

You can build those things in modern frameworks, it will just be more headache and will feel outdated in 6 months.

Where are my backbone apps? In the trash? Me ember apps? Next to them. My create-react-apps? On top of those. My Next apps? Being trashed as we speak. My rails apps? Online and making money every year with minimal upgrade time. What the hell was I thinking.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#214

Post by tdeck »

> A few weeks ago I realized I had no reliable way to know if any of it was correct: whether it actually does what I said it should do.

I can't understand the mindset that would lead someone not to have realized this from the beginning.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#216

Post by tdeck »

xandrius wrote: post #112
paganel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.

It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.

> who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?"

People who enjoy the process of completing the task?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#217

Post by tdeck »

afro88 wrote: post #30

I guess to reach this point you have already decided you don't care what the code looks like. Something I'm starting to struggle with is when agents can now do longer and more complex tasks, how do you review all the code? Last week I did about 4 weeks of work over 2 days first with long running agents working against plans and checklists, then smaller task clean ups, bugfixes and refactors. But all this code needs t…

If you haven't reviewed the code yet, how can you say it did 4 weeks of work in 2 days? You haven't verified the correctness, and besides reviewing the code is part of the work.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#218

Post by ssk42 »

skybrian wrote: post #166
ssk42 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun to see you not on tildes. Setting up a clean room is one of the only ways to do Evals on agentic harnesses. Especially prevalent with Windsurf which doesn’t have an easy CLI start. So how? The easiest answer when allowed is docker. Literally new image per prompt. There’s also flags with Claude to not use memory and from there you can use -p to have it just be like a normal cli tool. Windsurf requires manual effor…

Sounds interesting, but I'm not quite getting the relevance for people writing code with an agent. Should I be doing evals?

Well I mean yes. I think people ought be aware for how the harnesses compare for their stacks. But clean room applies for this RGR situation too

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#219

Post by zarzavat »

habinero wrote: post #116
xienze wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a tremendous amount of planning, babysitting, verification, and token cost just to avoid writing code and tests yourself.

It's assigning yourself the literal worst parts of the job - writing specs, docs, tests and reading someone else's code.

There's a real disconnect. I was talking to a junior developer and they were telling me how Claude is so much smarter than them and they feel inferior.

I couldn't relate. From my perspective as a senior, Claude is dumb as bricks. Though useful nonetheless.

I believe that if you're substantially below Claude's level then you just trust whatever it says. The only variables you control are how much money you spend, how much markdown you can produce, and how you arrange your agents.

But I don't understand how the juniors on HN have so much money to throw at this technology.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#220

Post by akhrail1996 »

Honestly I think the "same AI checking same AI" concern is a bit overstated at this point. If the agents don't share context - separate conversations, no common memory - Opus is good enough that they don't really fall into the same patterns. At least at the micro level, like individual functions and logic. Maybe at the macro/architectural level there's still something there but in practice I'm not seeing it much anymore.
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