Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We put a coding agent in a while loop

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 317 posts

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#281

Post by narmiouh »

joshmlewis wrote: post #252

One of the biggest nuggets people need to take away from this: > At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track. Keep your prompts / agent instructions short. Focus on the wide view, not specifics.

The problem with simple prompts it it gives AI the most leeway to do what it thinks is important, which may work in case of just convert from one language to another (even in those cases it took its own liberties - good or bad). This won't work when devising a new application from scratch or where you are expecting consistent agentic output to be usable in a predictable situation.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#282

Post by mr_toad »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #222
pelario wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I hate it; I don't like magic or black boxes. So, no compilers for you neither ? (To be fair: I'm not loving the whole vibe coding thing. But I'm trying to approach this wave with open mind, and looking for the good arguments in both side. This is not one of them)

I think you're misunderstanding. AI is not a black-box, and neither is a compiler. We(as a species) know how they work, and what they do. The 'black-boxes' are the theoretical systems non-technical users are building via 'vibe-coding'. When your LLM says we need to spin up an EC2 instance, users will spin one up. Is it configured? Why is it configured that way? Do you really need a VPS instead of a Pi? These are ques…

> AI is not a black-box

Any worthwhile AI is non-linear, and it’s output is not able to be predicted (if it was, we’d just use the predictor).

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#283

Post by VincentEvans »

linsomniac wrote: post #236
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…

>it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time. IMHO, there's a strong case for the opposite. My vibe coding prompts are along the lines of "Please implement the plan described in `phase1-epic.md` using `specification.prd` as a guide." The specification and epics are version controlled and a part of the project. My vibe coded software has better design documentation t…

I assume you have some software engineering fundamentals training.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#284

Post by AlexandrB »

miohtama wrote: post #141
heavyset_go wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you've got your own IP. AI output isn't copyrighted in the US.

He is referring to taking AI output and making it your company's property.

If AI output can't be copyrighted it can't be your company's property, just the company's secret. And you can't sue anyone who uses the secret if it gets out.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#285

Post by hasperdi »

mnky9800n wrote: post #266
daveidol wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So wait is he an actual software engineer doing this as a side hustle? Or like a vibe coder guru that basically only works with AI tools?

He said he used to be a software dev. Then he started consulting on the side making websites, doing SEO, and he just started doing that fulltime. But then SEO died because of AI (according to him anyways). then he started vibe coding like a year or two ago and saw all these people posting in forums about how everything they made broke and they don't know what to do. So he started helping people for money and it turne…

Any pointers which forums do these people hang out?

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#286

Post by mr_toad »

surajrmal wrote: post #242
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…

Does anyone remember the websites that front page and dreamweaver used to generate from its wysiwyg editor? It was a nightmare to modify manually and convinced me to never rely on generated code.

I agree that the code that dreamweaver generated was truely awful. But compilers and interpreters also generate code, and these days they are very good at it. Technically the browser’s rendering engine is a code generator as well, so if you’re hand-coding HTML you’re still relying on code generation.

Declarative languages and AI go hand in hand. SQL was intended to be a ‘natural’ language that the query engine (an old-school AI) would use to write code.

Writing natural language prompts to produce code is not that different, but we’re using “stochastic” AI, and stochastic means random, which means mistakes and other non-ideal outputs.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#287

Post by zurtri »

mr_toad wrote: post #233
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…

A big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget. Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.

So very true.

And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff.

I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time.

Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#288

Post by mnky9800n »

hasperdi wrote: post #285
mnky9800n wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said he used to be a software dev. Then he started consulting on the side making websites, doing SEO, and he just started doing that fulltime. But then SEO died because of AI (according to him anyways). then he started vibe coding like a year or two ago and saw all these people posting in forums about how everything they made broke and they don't know what to do. So he started helping people for money and it turne…

Any pointers which forums do these people hang out?

I wish. He said that in the beginning he built a core group just with direct contacts but then he started a YouTube channel to drive traffic to the discord. He paid my buymeacoffee.com link because I showed him my windowfied.com tool I made to let you have dir commands on osx instead of ls.

I hope you can meet him on a plane too.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#289

Post by sfarshid »

nkmnz wrote: post #169

hi simon, will the vue3 version of assistant ui be maintained? that would be awesome! p.s.: funny to meet again here. Last time we met was 2022 in Berlin! congrats to your journey so far!!

Hey, thank you! We are working on refactoring the codebase to support both React and Vue in the same repo, official support for Vue is still a few months out

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#290

Post by huksley »

ghuntley wrote: post #107
CuriouslyC wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started building a project by trying to wire in existing open source stuff. When I looked at the build and stuff that would cause me to bring in, and the actual stuff I needed from the open source tools, it turned out to be MUCH faster/cleaner to just get Claude to check out the repo and port the stuff I needed directly. Now I do a calculus with dependencies. Do I want to track the upstream, is the rigging around t…

> If not, just port and move on. Exactly the point behind this post https://ghuntley.com/libraries/

Generated by AI libraries will by definition have all the security bugs you might encounter in the open, since it trains on them.

I would say, it is better maintain your own AI improved forks of the libraries and I am hoping that pattern will be more common and will also benefit upstream libraries as well.

Post reply on HN