Agents are a first-generation technology. They propose and act at the same time. I recommend you read https://safebots.ai/agents.html
I believe agents are the wrong abstraction. I came up with a superset called an Abject. See https://abject.world Seems safebox went after a subset.
I really think there is something here. It's a very low level general primitive, and you're right, OOP has been around for a long time. Objects and protocols, e.g. in objective C.
If you want, I'm happy to jump on a zoom and talk. You can use calendly.com/safebotsai
I tried to capture some of my feelings on this on a recent personal blog post/rant. The easiest phrase is that LLMs are "legacy code as a service". They are trained on other people's legacy code. (No one is intentionally feeding LLMs their best proprietary code.) They produce output that is "Day 1 Legacy Code" in the sense that there's no human code owner to take responsibility and you might be able to ask the LLM th…
"legacy code as a service" - that's apt. But would they be better if they trained exclusively on 'good code'? I know I don't know the answer to that question and I get the feeling that few people actually understand how they work enough to feel comfortable with asserting that to be true.
Yeah, I still wouldn't trust them if they were training on more good code, either. I think I understand enough of how they work to believe that even given plenty of good code they won't be able to learn the parts that make good code truly good. That's where I start into poetry metaphors and that the best code is not just concerned with poetry forms (the rhythm and meter required by the language) nor the literal meaning (the compiler output) but also the human elements of the poem such as the creative storytelling and multiple levels of metaphors. I cannot see the current technology getting good at those human parts of the poetry, no matter how good they get at the literal and the form.
IMO I think we're in the "endgame" as it were of seeing these LLMs slowly turn into multipliers for users who are capable already and also being good at some tasks autonomously. I still don't see ( or really even know ) how we go from that to a world where the majority of businesses, especially SAAS companies only or mostly have Agents doing the critical development work
The thing is why would forgetting even matter if the AI can just remind you of anything that you forgot?
Remembering and understanding aren't the same thing. Merely reciting facts doesn't automatically give you the ability to apply those facts to solve problems.
You can just keep asking questions till you understand it
Claude code is insanely useful for explaining other peoples code
I genuinely appreciated this comment—it made me chuckle. That said, I think there are better approaches to working with AI besides “here’s a big vague thing to work on, go write some code”. I think you have to iterate somewhat closely with the AI to write a doc describing exactly what you want the system to do and then scope out very narrow tickets and then have a separate agent do the TDD to actually produce the thi…
> don’t let a code writing agent have too much scope—just a narrowly scoped ticket it's interesting cuz my intuition is to give the language model writing the files as much context as possible, which means all of the previous planning thread. but I also thought you should plan with a small model and implement with a large one, and the meta seems to be plan with an expensive one and delegate code output to smaller one…
Models seem to perform worse if you give them too much context. Even if you have a large context window, it seems like they’re only “smart” in the first few tens of thousands of tokens (including the system prompt, which is often huge). Also, it seems like they’re do better if you start a fresh agent off with a very narrow task and give them access to more context as necessary rather than shoving everything you have into their context window and wishing them well.
But I should also emphasize my limited experience and the rapid pace that this stuff is evolving.
> As a senior developer, 25+ years, I have been thrown recently into a meeting "hey can you join in for 5 mins". This is a common thing doctors complain about. Patients come in, saying they just need a prescription for some drug or other. Good doctors often refuse to give any drugs or any advice until they understand the whole situation properly. If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back again…
> If you're a senior developer, you're the one who has to push back against behaviour you don't like. You have the authority. "Hm, interesting question. I'm going to need more context before I can give you my point of view. Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture / explain what actual problems you're trying to solve with this approach?" One of us misunderstood the GP; I understood him to mean that…
I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you, but the number of developers NOT using agentic coders in my workplace is 0. And I know this is the same in peers workplaces.
> I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you, Why would that matter? I'm not giving you my experience of developers next to me, I'm telling you what I gleaned from published reports.
I don't believe those figures. Perhaps we could discuss more if you linked the reports.
In any case, I know how these arguments go. It doesn't really matter.
most people are around mid by definition. mid is good. a lot of companies pay good money to find mid devs.
Yes, and? Something can be both scare and inadequate to a given task. FAANG L5s cost a pretty penny but I wouldn't trust a random one to prove a crypto library correct.
Number of people who i personally met and would entrust a crypto library to i can count on one hand. You're moving that goalpost at relativistic speeds now.
High quality c++ code today looks exactly same as it did six months, hell, six years ago. Innovation doesn’t come from code tricks
True innovation is doing something new that has never been seen before. Even if you are doing it in a stable language that's just a stable poetry form (rhyme and meter and formatting), the real magic is the content of the poetry, and the real beauty of code is when the poetry reads well to both audiences, the compiler and the next maintainer, on multiple levels, the literal and the metaphorical. LLMs can't reach the…
What you're describing is not innovation in the business sense but some kind of experimental art. Software engineering is not art as the name suggests - it's a craft, even though there's a self-expression component to it.