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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#271

Post by mjrbrennan »

tudelo wrote: post #212
mjrbrennan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

Yes that's fair, but not the case for me. Everything can run locally and specs run quickly for covering things claude changes. For everything else, the GitHub CI run is 10-15m and catches any outlier failures, and I'm usually working on more than one thing at a time anyway so it doesn't really matter to wait for this.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#272

Post by computerdork »

godelski wrote: post #263
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…

Hmm, not so sure TDD is a failed paradigm. Maybe it isn't a pancea, but it is seems like it's changed how software development is done.

Especially for backend software and also for tools, seems like automated tests can cover quite a lot of use cases a system encounters. Their coverage can become so good that they'll allow you to make major changes to the system, and as long as they pass the automated tests, you can feel relatively confident the system will work in prod (have seen this many times).

But maybe you're separating automated testing and TDD as two separate concepts?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#274

Post by mvdtnz »

godelski wrote: post #263
hi_hi wrote: post #206

This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…

I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…

> But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable.

You don't need to believe this to practice TDD. In fact I challenge you to find one single mainstream TDD advocate who believes this.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#275

Post by godelski »

zarzavat wrote: post #219
habinero wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  > I was talking to a junior developer and they were telling me how Claude is so much smarter than them and they feel inferior.
Every time I talk to a wizard I feel like they're so much smarter than me and it makes me feel inferior.

So I take that feeling and use it to drive me to become a wizard like them. I've generally found that wizards are very happy to take on apprentices.

I'm not trying to call Claude a wizard (I have similar feelings to you), but more that I don't understand that junior's take. We all feel dumb. All but time. Even the wizards! But it's that feeling that drives you to better yourself and it's what turns you into a wizard.

Honestly so much of what I hear from the "AI does all my coding" crowd just sounds very junior. It's just the same like how a year or two ago they were saying "it does the repetitive stuff". Isn't that what functions, libraries, functors, templates, and other abstractions are for? It feels like we're back to that laughable productivity metric of lines of code or number of commits. I don't know why we love our cargo cults. It seems people are putting so much effort into their cargo cults that they could have invented a real airplane by now.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#276

Post by godelski »

gedy wrote: post #138
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.

Yes with the reward of: I don't understand this code and didn't learn anything incrementally about the feature I "planned".

Well they probably have the same ability to evaluate the correctness of a feature as a middle manager with a Harvard business degree

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#277

Post by zhangchen »

silentsvn wrote: post #87

One thing I've been wrestling with building persistent agents is memory quality. Most frameworks treat memory as a vector store — everything goes in, nothing gets resolved. Over time the agent is recalling contradictory facts with equal confidence. The architecture we landed on: ingest goes through a certainty scoring layer before storage. Contradictions get flagged rather than silently stacked. Memories that get rec…

[flagged]

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#278

Post by tdeck »

the_lonely_time wrote: post #213
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm guessing you avoided the CoffeeScript era of Rails, which is a good thing.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#279

Post by Incipient »

rurban wrote: post #260
jack_pp wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

PHP did better than python and perl. Python is doomed. PHP got a good jit already, a good OO lately, good frameworks, stable extensions. It has a company behind. Unlike python or ruby which break right and left all the time on updates. you have to use bunkers of venvs, without any security updates. A nightmare. PHP can scale and has a future.

Python is doomed? That's new.

You use python docker images pinned to a stable version (3.11 etc), and between bigger versions, you test and handle any breaking changes.

I feel like this approach applies to pretty much every language?

Who on earth raw dogs on "language:latest" and just hopes for the best?

Granted I wouldn't be running Facebook's backend on something like this. But i feel that isn't a problem 95% of people need to deal with.

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