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…
Agents that run while I sleep
281–290 of 532 posts
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But even better, tell it to create subagents to form red team, green team and refactor team while the main instance coordinates them, respecting the clean-room rules. It really works. It helps, but it definitely doesn't always work, particularly as refactors go on and tests have to change. Useless tests start grow in count and important new things aren't tested or aren't tested well. I've had both Opus 4.6 and Code…
The trick is, with the setup I mentioned, you change the rewards. The concept is: Red Team (Test Writers), write tests without seeing implementation. They define what the code should do based on specs/requirements only. Rewarded by test failures. A new test that passes immediately is suspicious as it means either the implementation already covers it (diminishing returns) or the test is tautological. Red's ideal outco…
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#283This is TDD? Tests first, then code? I do first the docs, then the tests, then the code. For years. What he describes is like that. Just that the plan step is suggesting docs, not writing actual docs.
TDD has always been flawed. Tests can't give you complete coverage, they are always incomplete. Though every time I say this people think I'm against tests. I'm just saying tests can't prove correctness. You'd have to be a lunatic to think they are proofs. Even crazier is having the LLMs write their own tests and think that that's proof. I'm sure it improves things, but proofs are a different beast all together. Seem…
Tests just catch the most simple mistakes, edge cases and some regressions.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#284This _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…
> sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Not if you are an AI gold rush shovel salesman. From the article: > I've run Claude Code workshops for over 100 engineers in the last six months
As I like this allegory really much, AI is (or should be) like and exoskeleton, should help people do things. If you step out of your car putting it first in drive mode, and going to sleep, next day it will be farther, but the question is, is it still on road
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick is, with the setup I mentioned, you change the rewards. The concept is: Red Team (Test Writers), write tests without seeing implementation. They define what the code should do based on specs/requirements only. Rewarded by test failures. A new test that passes immediately is suspicious as it means either the implementation already covers it (diminishing returns) or the test is tautological. Red's ideal outco…
You guys are describing wonderful things, but I've yet to see any implementation. I tried coding my own agents, yet the results were disappointing. What kind of setup do you use ? Can you share ? How much does it cost ?
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You can use persistent DB connections, and app server such as FrankenPHP to persist state between requests, but that still wouldn't help if DB is the bottleneck.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
When push comes to shove, software can usually be fudged. Unlike a building or a water treatment plant where the first fuck up could mean that people die. I like to think that people writing actual mission critical software try their absolute best to get it right before shipping and that the rest our industry exists in a totally separate world where a bug in the code is just actually not that big of a deal. Yeah, it…
Quite. We’re far more similar to construction workers than we are civil engineers, despite the lofty title we like to bestow upon ourselves.
Instead we make pre-mass production bespoke products where each part is slightly filled and fitted together from bunch of random components. Say the barrel can't be changed between two different handguns. We just have magic technology to replicate the single gun multiple times. Does not mean it is actually mass-produced in sense say our current power tools are.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
I write lots of automated tests, but almost always after the development is finished. The only exception is when reproducing a bug, where I first write the test that reproduces it, then I fix the code.
TDD is about developing tests first then writing the code to make the tests pass. I know several people who gave it an honest try but gave up a few months later. They do advocate everyone should try the approach, though, simply because it will make you write production code that's easier to test later on.
Re: Agents that run while I sleep
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pe…