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

Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 532 posts

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#301

Post by zarzavat »

aprdm wrote: post #249
zarzavat wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like everyone's gone mad. Here I am mostly writing code by hand, with some AI assistant help. I have a Claude subscription but only use it occasionally because it can take more time to review and fix the generated code as it would to hand-write it. Claude only saves me time on a minority of tasks where it's faster to prompt than hand-write. And then I read about people spending hundreds or thousands of dolla…

Why read code when you are getting results fast ? See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... I am not kidding. People don't seem to understand what's actually happening in our industry. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johubbard_github-eleutherailm...

I'm not getting results. That's the point. Claude doesn't fucking work without human intervention. When left to its own devices it makes bad decisions. It writes bad code. It needs constant supervision to stop it from going off the rails and replacing working code with broken code. It doesn't know what it's doing!

It's about as far as you can get from being able to work independently.

Yegge is an entertainer. Gas Town is performance art, it's not meant to be taken seriously.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#302

Post by jongjong »

I think the idea of running agents while you sleep isn't going to work until AI can match or exceed human-level agency and intelligence.

Whenever I coded any serious solution as a technical co-founder, every single day there was a major new debate about the product direction. Though we made massive 'progress' and built out a whole new universe in software, we haven't yet managed to find product market fit. It's like constant tension. If the intelligence of two relatively intelligent humans with a ton of experience and complimentary expertise isn't enough to find product-market-fit after one year, this gives you an idea about how high the bar is for an AI agent.

It's like the problem was that neither me nor my domain expert co-founder who had been in his industry for over 15 years had a sufficiently accurate worldview about the industry or human psychology to be able to produce a financially viable solution. Technically, it works perfectly but it just doesn't solve anyone's problem.

So just imagine how insanely smart AI has to be to compete in the current market.

Maybe you could have 100 agents building and promoting 100 random apps per day... But my feeling is that you're going to end up spending more money on tokens and domain names then you will earn in profits. Maybe deploy them all under the same domain with different subdomains? Not great for SEO... Also, the market for all these basic low-end apps is going to be extremely competitive.

IMO, the best chance to win will be on medium and complex systems and IMO, these will need some kind of human input.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#303

Post by lrytz »

blog looks suspicious

- privacy policy links to marketing company `beehiiv.com`. the blog author doesn't show up there.

- the profile picture url is `.../Generated_Image_March_03__2026_-_1_55PM.jpg.jpeg`

i didn't dig or read further.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#304

Post by frio »

jack_pp wrote: post #240
tbossanova wrote: post #231

Earlier 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?

“PHP was so easy and fast that they’ve built such a successful startup they now have scaling problems” is, as far as I can tell, an endorsement of PHP and not a criticism of it.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#305

Post by zarzavat »

tayo42 wrote: post #281
zarzavat wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's 20 dollars a month to use...

Yes for the basic plan. However there are people who claim to use the API and spend hundreds, or thousands, of dollars a month.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#306

Post by duggan »

jack_pp wrote: post #240
tbossanova wrote: post #231

Earlier 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?

> I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful

You can stop there! Sounds like PHP worked for them. Already doing better than 90% of startups.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#307

Post by codethief »

devinplatt wrote: post #265
egeozcan wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

I'm curious how this works if the green team writes an implementation that makes a network call like an RPC. Red team might not anticipate this if the spec does detail every expected RPC (which seems unreasonable: this could vary based on implementation). But a unit test would need mocks. Is green team allowed to suggest mocks to add to the test? (Even if they can't read the tests themselves?) This also seems gamaeab…

I think the solution here is: Don't mock and inject dependencies explicitly, as function parameters / monads / algebraic effects. Make side effects part of the spec/interface.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#308

Post by jspdown »

At this stage, AI is no longer a tool that enhances your ability to ship code, it has replaced you entirely in that role. You don't control what is shipped, and you can't verify if it's correct. That's a serious problem! As software engineers, we remain accountable for code we no longer fully understand.

Then, what comes next feels less like a new software practice and more like a new religion, where trust has to replaces understanding, and the code is no longer ours to question.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#309

Post by silon42 »

imron wrote: post #293
watermelon0 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 95% of what app does is calling a DB, then the bottleneck is in the DB, not with the PHP. 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.

Sometimes it’s still the app: rows = select all accounts for each row in rows: update row But that’s not necessarily a PHP problem. N+1 queries are everywhere.

Depending on what you are doing, the above is not necessarily bad.. often much better than an SQL that locks an entire table (potentially blocking the whole DB, if this is one of the key tables).

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#310

Post by kolinko »

jspdown wrote: post #308

At this stage, AI is no longer a tool that enhances your ability to ship code, it has replaced you entirely in that role. You don't control what is shipped, and you can't verify if it's correct. That's a serious problem! As software engineers, we remain accountable for code we no longer fully understand. Then, what comes next feels less like a new software practice and more like a new religion, where trust has to rep…

Or formal methods and other tools for verifying the code security?
Post reply on HN