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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#231

Post by tbossanova »

jack_pp wrote: post #208
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not laughing about PHP. To this very day many of my best projects are built on PHP. And while last 7 years I have spent in full stack JavaScript/TypeScript environment it has never produced the same things I was actually able to do with PHP. I actually feel that things I built 15 years ago in PHP were better than anything I am trying to achieve with modern things that gets outdated every 6 months.

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

Nothing; but PHP, in experienced hands, will be waaay more productive for small-to-medium things. One issue is that experienced hands are increasingly hard to come by. Truly big, complicated things, built by large teams or numbers of teams, teams with a lot of average brains or AIs trained on average brains, will be better off in something like Typescript/React. And everyone wants to work on the big complicated stuff. So the "modern frameworks" will continue to dominate while smaller, more niche shops will wonder why they waste their time.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#232

Post by timr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #227
timr wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level But it works well enough for most use cases. Most of what we do isn’t life or death.

> But it works well enough for most use cases.

So does the code produced by any bad engineer.

So either we’re finally admitting that all of that leetcode screening and engineer quality gating was a farce, or it wasn’t, and you’re wrong.

I think the answer is in the middle, but the pendulum has swung too far in the “doesn’t matter” direction.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#234

Post by nemo44x »

How do people not understand this? LLMs are goal machines. You need to give them the specific goal if you want good results and continue to reenforce it. So of course this means speccing and design work.

People are so enamored with how fast the 20% part is now and yes it’s amazing. But the 80% part by time (designing, testing, reviewing, refactoring, repairing) still exists if you want coherent systems of non-trivial complexity.

All the old rules still apply.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#235

Post by dheera »

jack_pp wrote: post #208
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not laughing about PHP. To this very day many of my best projects are built on PHP. And while last 7 years I have spent in full stack JavaScript/TypeScript environment it has never produced the same things I was actually able to do with PHP. I actually feel that things I built 15 years ago in PHP were better than anything I am trying to achieve with modern things that gets outdated every 6 months.

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

Not have to "build" anything. You edit code and it is already deployed on your dev instance.

Deploying to production is just scp -rv * production:/var/www/

Beautifully simple. No npm build crap.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#236

Post by cherk3 »

timr wrote: post #211
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What I want to know is, what has this increase in code generation led to? What is the impact?

I don't mean 'Oh I finally have the energy to do that side project that I never could'.

Afterall, the trade-offs have to be worth something... right? Where's the 1-person billion dollar firms at That Mr Altman spoke about?

The way I think of it is code has always been an intermediary step between a vision and an object of value. So is there an increase in this activity that yields the trade-offs to be a net benefit?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#237

Post by taneq »

nurettin wrote: post #64
lagrange77 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reward hacking is very real and hard to guard against. Is it really about rewards? Im genuinely curious. Because its not a RL model.

They probably meant goal hacking. (I just made that up)

I refer to it as ‘wanking’. It’s doing something that’s unproductive but that’s incentivised by its architecture.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#238

Post by jack_pp »

dheera wrote: post #235
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?

Not have to "build" anything. You edit code and it is already deployed on your dev instance. Deploying to production is just scp -rv * production:/var/www/ Beautifully simple. No npm build crap.

You trade having to compile for actually having code that can scale

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#239

Post by novaleaf »

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?

you are replying to a bot, that's why.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#240

Post by jack_pp »

tbossanova wrote: post #231
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?

Nothing; but PHP, in experienced hands, will be waaay more productive for small-to-medium things. One issue is that experienced hands are increasingly hard to come by. Truly big, complicated things, built by large teams or numbers of teams, teams with a lot of average brains or AIs trained on average brains, will be better off in something like Typescript/React. And everyone wants to work on the big complicated stuff…

I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful, app doesn't scale, high latency etc. What does their php code do? 95% of it is calling a DB.

You're telling me today with LLM power multiplier it's THAT much faster to write in PHP compared to something that can actually have a future?

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