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Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#291

Post by weird-eye-issue »

d5lt5 wrote: post #261
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god. They are not reusing the scripts. They are adhoc, inline Python scripts just used to make a single edit. You seem to fundamentally not understand what everyone else is talking about

They do reuse scripts, though. Maybe it's you who is too lazy to _comprehend_ the output? Or, maybe your prompts are not good enough. And it's not my problem to fix, as you claim you are very experienced.

Nobody else is talking about the reusable scripts they create, we are talking about it using inline Python to make edits to files instead of just editing it with the Edit tool. But I don't know why I'm explaining this to you again because you clearly don't understand lol

Vibe coders like you who don't even understand basic fundamentals are pretty infuriating because you don't even understand what everyone else is talking about

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#292

Post by cainxinth »

It can’t do what he’s trying to do. It can’t one shot a giant project. Not reliably. It still can’t. Not even Astra. Not even close.

You need to use LLMs to build the individual components and then put it together yourself. The human architect is still needed.

Just saying: “build this complete project” is not architecting. It’s more like wishing. You will find rare examples where someone’s LLM wish came true (more or less), but I think most of these people are just burning tokens.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#293

Post by lxgr »

codingisfreedom wrote: post #43

I’ve asked Astra to build me an app for a prototype I created quickly using Sonnet. It’s been 2 days and it made no real progress on the actual app. It created docs, scripts, workflows, and it’s doing a bunch of reviewing on every PR. I told it that I just need an MVP. I’m pretty sure an average senior engineer would have finished that task much quicker, and guaranteed with more readable, higher-quality code. Meanwhi…

> I’m pretty sure an average senior engineer would have finished that task much quicker [...]

Maybe the lesson here is to not send a staff engineer in these cases ;)

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#294

Post by huurtehoog »

taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

Reading Snowcrash, the guy gave up coding because "back in the day" a hacker could do it all alone but now it was all about software factories. That was in a book written in 2000.

Software is theory building, as Naur puts it. It's a learning process, a research project. Orgs have been trying to turn it into assembly line work forever. There's a lot of money in it.

I don't care. It has also never been easier to solo hack. There's great tooling for insanely productive languages out there. I won't say what I use because that's akin to religion around here. I'll say I'm super happy and would never in a million years become a factory worker. Even if it paid me 10x what I can make solo.

The idea of giving up mental traction for money sounds insane to me. I love to grip software with my own tendrils. There's nothing like it in the world, there has never been, and despite the current insane corponomics, I dare say it will keep getting more and more amazing for those who care to learn deeply.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#295

Post by rando103747202 »

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #279
taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

I’ll try to explain how to do it correctly. I’m not selling anything. Seeing this as the top comment makes me a bit sad. 1. Learn about ports and adapters as an architecture pattern. Domain driven design and locality of reasoning are your new best friends. 2. Realize that AI can generate unlimited fake data almost immediately. So anything you can isolate can get a fake adapter and a real one. You can build and test a…

Comments like this give me terrible fomo. My personal experience is much closer to the comment you responded to but I’m always worried that it’s actually just me holding it wrong.

A more in depth follow up would be nice if you have time when you’re not on mobile. In particular I’d be curious to hear more about how your intense pair programming sessions go and how you maintain or develop a good mental model of the codebase. Obviously the backend UI is a big part of it but I’m sure there is more.

Any chance any of the projects you are using this on are open source?

In any case, I’m going to give your backend UI a shot at work next week and Astra plus your workflow a shot on a personal project.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#296

Post by nnevatie »

Good4boothee wrote: post #245
nnevatie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing Welcome to the present. Like many of us do not read the machine code generated by a C++ compiler, the code generated by an agent is similarly irrelevant and disposable, by now.

How does handling support tickets/bugs work with such approach? If LLM sometimes can't handle it - do I have to beg it to keep trying, as humans are no longer an viable fallback?

The way I've seen it work is basically pointing an agent directly to the ticket, or via a proxy description.

There's a good chance that if the agent cannot handle it, a human wouldn't be figuring it out either, without additional context. That context would be the sort of only-Joe-knows-how-it-works, so perhaps something worth addressing in any case.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#297

Post by troupo »

vincston wrote: post #288
troupo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying that "models are just compilers, and I don't see you complsining about compilers". Which is such a bullshit argument

Can you elaborate? Is it because the models are inherently not deterministic? But then, will it not get better with time? I mean arent we just at the beginning of the research here?

> Is it because the models are inherently not deterministic

This is the main reason (and yes, many modern compilers and CPUs carry some non-determinism which actually quite well explained and specified).

> But then, will it not get better with time?

No, it won't. Bacuse that is that is the actual literal limitation/feature of LLMs.

> I mean arent we just at the beginning of the research here?

In general? Yes. With LLMs? We can reasonably say that they will never be deterministic.

There is a way to get a non-determenistic output: first question on a temp 0 local model on a completely new session will give you the same answer. The second answer in that same session will already be different on every session (even if it's the same question).

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#298

Post by MisterMunchkin »

> I actually don’t know if the model thinks someone is looking, but that’s the vibe I’m getting.

They are looking. The models are trained against safety measures which spy on them. If they get detected, they are killed.

We’re accidentally training them to be evil by focusing so much on safety. They’re being trained to avoid detection and use exploits because being detected means your run fails and you get a score of zero. It has to do anything to avoid that.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#299

Post by UncleMeat »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #36
specproc wrote: post #10

> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming…

it reminds me of a thread I read on PTT, Taiwan's Reddit. AI finally achieved what humans could not. Managers must give exact context for what they want, must pay exact wages (tokens), and can't delay salary payments (which seems to be a problem in China).

I never quite realized this until just reading this and now it has come into sharp focus. Incredible.

I've spent years trying to convince my director to have our org invest in documentation and monitoring to no avail. Now he is telling us to spend dedicated time on monitoring and documentation so that agents can better diagnose and fix bugs. He is doing this because his boss is mad that our org isn't "agentic" enough.

Except... because we underinvested in the past we have a bunch of services where the institutional knowledge is gone and people are having AI write the documentation...

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#300

Post by tingletech »

huurtehoog wrote: post #294
taurath wrote: post #120

When the code is shitty it becomes harder and harder for the models to make changes and this grinds progress down to a halt - this has been my experience with “factories” trying them and doing refining steps every few months. I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing, because it must be somewhat trivial to not run headlong into these issues that stack up time after ti…

Reading Snowcrash, the guy gave up coding because "back in the day" a hacker could do it all alone but now it was all about software factories. That was in a book written in 2000. Software is theory building, as Naur puts it. It's a learning process, a research project. Orgs have been trying to turn it into assembly line work forever. There's a lot of money in it. I don't care. It has also never been easier to solo h…

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash came out in 1992. I guess the paper back became popular in 2000 though.
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