Live data from Hacker News

Who manages the agents?

off-policy.com

81–90 of 108 posts

Re: Who manages the agents?

#81
post #54

> The best agentic developers are now probably exceeding 100x, doing massive rewrites of codebases that would have taken years of engineering in days I‘m not denying that you can get far with a port of a well tested codebase. But it’s a bit of a selective example, no? Porting a large framework to Rust is not something that’s making up a meaningful fraction of a developer’s time usually. It’s also a bit of a luxury IM…

To add to this, for all the claims of 100x, can anyone cite an example of someone actually pushing 100x in a domain that isn’t “translate or port tool/library/whatever from language A to language B”? Because that’s literally what LLMs were invented for and that’s not a normal part of work. I will fully admit we have examples of people converting Postgres to Rust, HL2 to wasm, etc. but that’s all porting. The code was…

I guess that’s why they call them Transformers

Re: Who manages the agents?

#82
post #9

Maybe a useful concept to adopt here is the DRI - Directly Responsible Individual, which is apparently a term first used by Apple. The GitLab Handbook has a good definition: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-r... "ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity" I think that role should be reserved for a human, who can then use all the agents t…

Excellent! We can use this to start to throw executives in jail and maybe society won't erode as fast.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#83
post #68

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

You definitely seem to have a much lower exposure level to flagship AI models. I manage fleets of AI agents (and manage engineers who manage fleets of AI agents) all day for my job, and I’m rarely touching code anymore. It’s not perfect, but it is insanely powerful. I’m having to actively plan for changes to our EPD org because what we need engineers to do today is a lot different than a year ago.

Don’t tell me, tell whoever is responsible for AI at Apple.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#84

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

> I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. Sounds to me like that day could be any day with the tech as it exists (?) lol You could use LLMs to help you build that reasonably quickly I imagine. Maybe not "weekend" quick, but within a couple weeks if you devote a couple hours a day. (Or maybe you're sm…

I probably could do something myself. The problem is hardware. I’d like to use HomePod, and it should be able to understand how I want my groceries sorted. The classification is so easy GPT 3.5 can do it, but that’s not the hard part.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#85
post #50

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

For free? This would be great to see, but unfortunately too many people are first trying to boil the entire ocean instead of such small swimming pools or bowls of water.

We have Siri, we have Apple Intelligence, we have AI that can solve open Erdős problems. Obviously, creating software is still hard.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#86

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

I can’t help but wonder how they’ve implemented the suggestions, I am not alone

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/s/Sk6kDfv3Hp

Re: Who manages the agents?

#87
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For free? This would be great to see, but unfortunately too many people are first trying to boil the entire ocean instead of such small swimming pools or bowls of water.

We have Siri, we have Apple Intelligence, we have AI that can solve open Erdős problems. Obviously, creating software is still hard.

Siri wasn't really designed to do those things, neither was Apple Intelligence.

AI is a new category of software, that can be applied to some kinds of problems that can make those kinds of problems hard.

Would you want this to work for free? I agree it's a very common pattern, and surprised it's not reasonably solved without some amounts of workarounds.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#88
I think the idea that AI leads to some kind of universal basic income or frees us up for leisure is misguided.

There was a point in time when the majority of people were basically required to work on producing bare necessities like food. But we have already come far past that, where we could easily produce more than enough food for everyone on earth with a relatively small amount of workers.

There is some work that is still more or less essential to a healthy society that humans must perform, but many many people are doing something non-essential (and those doing essential work are often not rewarded proportionally to the "essentialness" of that work). We invent different kinds of "work" to fit into the capitalist machine that we have built, not because it is required for human sustainability or enriching our lives in any way. Some work might be actively harmful to society in every way other than keeping capital flowing around in some circle, and more and more of that capital is being captured/hoarded by some ultra wealthy individuals or corporations and not recirculating at all.

The problem is allocation. We allocate everything via capital, which I recognize has had some very positive outcomes at certain points in history, but may be reaching a point of making less and less sense for the modern world. The work I do honestly does not contribute much of anything to anyone. I do it because I am paid to, and I use that money to pay for my families needs. If my job was automated I would not be freed up for leisure, I would need to find some other work or service to be paid for to survive, regardless of how "important" that work is.

AI eliminating a swath of non-essential work does nothing to help with that allocation issue, in fact it probably ends in a worse overall allocation. AI may legitimately assist with some slice of "essential".work, but probably not that much of it.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#89

The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exact…

i think the doomsday scenario is more likely from someone giving AI access to crucial systems and it accidentally making critical mistakes, rather than it outsmarting the system

Re: Who manages the agents?

#90

To me, the "who manages the agents" shtick has the same grifty smell as “your developers are downloading from random Docker registries / random NPM packages” and "Shadow IT". None of it is wrong exactly, but it feels like same enterprise-security machine finding the next anxiety surface than a "world is on fire right now" concern. All of it always ends as a priesthood and a six-figure governance platform, rather than…

you're describing the aphorism of: blame rolls down hill while congratulations starts at the top.

Related: "Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan."
Post reply on HN