[HN Gopher] Eight more months of agents
___________________________________________________________________
Eight more months of agents
Author : arrowsmith
Score : 60 points
Date : 2026-02-08 11:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (crawshaw.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (crawshaw.io)
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| In the past couple days I've become less skeptical of the
| capabilities of LLMs and now more alarmed by them, contra the
| author. I think if we as a society continue to accept the
| development of LLMs and the control of them by the major AI
| companies there will be massively negative repercussions. And I
| don't mean repercussions like "a rogue AI will destroy humanity"
| per se, but these things will potentially cause massive social
| upheaval, a large amount of negative impacts on mental health and
| cognition, etc. I think if you see LLMs as powerful but not
| dangerous you are not being honest.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| I see them as powerful and dangerous. The goal for decades now
| is to reduce the human population to 500 million. All human
| technology was pushed to this end, covertly. If we suddenly
| have a technology that renders white collar workers useless, we
| will get to that number faster than expected.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human
| technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people
| out there who are demanding that this technology come up with
| social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human
| population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.
|
| Or less.
|
| And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be
| checking against.
|
| So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and
| dangerous. These are language models, so they're more
| effective against humans and their languages. And self-
| preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there
| is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of
| intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity... for some
| definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| There are some good things here:
|
| First, we currently have 4 frontier labs, and a bunch of 2nd
| tier ones following. The fact that we don't have just oAI or
| just Anthropic or just Google is good in the general sense, I
| would say. The 4 labs racing each other and trading SotA status
| for ~a few weeks is good for the end consumer. They keep each
| other honest and keep the prices down. Imagine if Anthropic
| could charge 60$ /MTok or oAI could charge 120$ /MTok for their
| gpt4 style models. They can't in good part because of the
| competition.
|
| Second, there's a bunch of labs / companies that have released
| and are continuing to release open mdoels. That's as close to
| "intelligence on tap" as you can get. And those models are
| ~6-12 months behind the SotA models, depending on your usecase.
| Even though the labs have largely different incentives to do
| so, a lot of them are still releasing open models. Hopefully
| that continues to hold. So not all control will be in the hands
| of big tech, even if the "best" will still be theirs. At some
| point "good enough" is fine.
|
| There's also the thing about geopolitics being involved in
| this. So far we've seen the EU jumping the gun on regulation,
| and we're kinda sorta paying for it. Everyone is still confused
| about what can or cannot be done in the EU. The US seems to be
| waiting to see what happens, and China will do whatever they
| do. The worst thing that can happen is that at some point the
| big players (Anthropic is the main driver) push for regulatory
| capture. That would really suck. Thankfully atm there's this
| lingering thinking that "if we do it, the others won't so we'll
| be on the back foot". Hopefully this holds, at least until the
| "good enough" from above is out :)
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| I'm not just concerned about control by one company, I'm
| concerned by control for the profit motive, and probably
| concerned about the wisdom of using these things for anything
| except extremely limited use cases (breakthrough scientific
| research, etc.). I think tech people have a bad tendency of
| viewing this through the lens of platform wars type stakes,
| and there are much bigger problems with AI. The fact that an
| alarming number of ex-and-current Anthropic people I've met
| think the world is going to end is something we should take
| heed of!
|
| The AI labs started down this path using the Manhattan
| Project as a metaphor and guess what? It's a good metaphor
| and we should embrace most of the wider implications of that
| (though I'd love to avoid all the MAD/cold war bullshit this
| time).
| hasperdi wrote:
| > It sounds like someone saying power tools should be outlawed in
| carpentry.
|
| I see this a lot here
| sp33der89 wrote:
| All metaphors break down at a certain point, but power tools
| and generative AI/LLMs being compared feels like somebody is
| romanticizing the art of programming a bit too much.
|
| Copyright law, education, just the sheer scale of things
| changing because of LLMs are some things off the top of my head
| why "power tools vs carpentry" is a bad analogy.
| Keyframe wrote:
| if that someone is clumsy, had an active war going on against
| basic tools before, and wandered into the carpentry from
| completely different area, then power tools might be a bad
| idea.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or
| "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There
| is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are
| both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even
| strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You
| can't "not understand"
|
| I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with
| astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here
| who are going to continue to make things very, very
| complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant
| parties are not working from the same assumption of basic
| knowledge.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl.
| ..
|
| There's a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the
| tools.
| derefr wrote:
| The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being
| felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the
| consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer
| 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on
| the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content
| related to software development these days, rather than paying
| much attention to what's currently happening to the world of
| movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for
| them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since
| that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that
| might have no relevance to their (professional or personal)
| life.
|
| "Anti-LLM sentiment" _within_ software development is nearly
| non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see
| on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just _pragmatic skepticism_
| around the effectiveness /utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for
| specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more
| than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to
| complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer
| sentiment."
|
| The difference between the perspectives you find in the
| creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to
| "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a
| question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM
| ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as
| entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can
| end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by
| accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the
| other set of ideas/beliefs/memes.
|
| (If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble
| effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks
| like. She _only_ hears the negative sentiment coming from the
| creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI
| slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she
| previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job
| is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge;
| so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything.
| [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing
| her industry" -- but they mean _ML_ , not generative AI.] She
| has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't
| have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She
| is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
| remich wrote:
| I think this is an interesting point, my one area of
| disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the
| programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing
| skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place,
| but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I
| get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the
| programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When
| I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear
| that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism,
| where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or
| experiences.
| overgard wrote:
| > "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly
| non-existent.
|
| Strong disagree right there. I remember talking to a
| (developer) coworker a few months ago who seemed like the
| biggest AI proponent on our team. When we were one-on-one
| during a lunch though, he revealed that he really doesn't
| like AI that much at all, he's just afraid to speak up
| against it. I'm in a few Discord channels with a lot of
| highly skilled (senior and principal programmers) who mostly
| work in game development (or adjacent), and most of them
| either mock LLMs or have a lot of derision for it. Hacker
| News is kind of a weird pro-AI bubble, most other places are
| not nearly as keen on this stuff.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly
| non-existent
|
| This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", which
| means that maybe I am misunderstanding you. Below are some
| examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you
| explain why you are not counting these?
|
| NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad"
| argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's
| great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every
| word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing
| of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what
| drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.
|
| 1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof
|
| These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so
| many people already spent their lives and money establishing
| themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot
| without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every
| large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large
| and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech
| leadership is focusing even more than they already were on
| cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic
| productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast >
| good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating
| how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed
| to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities.
| Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job
| security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less
| proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse
| office conditions, etc).
|
| 2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the
| other stuff in this list)
|
| This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs
| but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging
| the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the
| types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these
| people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a
| different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable
| depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the
| old job.
|
| 3. Uncertainty/skepticism
|
| I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-
| LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was
| forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing
| my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be
| unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore
| the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume
| it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still
| overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are
| not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's
| more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the
| kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift
| away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete
| thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your
| hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that
| can create a feeling of lack of control.
|
| 4. Expertise loss
|
| A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already
| experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new
| devs and existing experienced devs.
|
| 5. The training data ownership/morality angle
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _How I program with agents_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221655 - June 2025 (295
| comments)
| dirkc wrote:
| > Using anything other than the frontier models is actively
| harmful
|
| If that is true, why should one invest in learning now rather
| than waiting for 8 months to learn whatever is the frontier model
| then?
| fusslo wrote:
| snarky answer: so you can be that 'AI guy' at your office that
| everyone avoids in the snackroom
| ej88 wrote:
| It's not like you need to take a course. The frontier models
| are the best, just using them and their harnesses and figuring
| out what works for your use case is the 'investing in
| learning'.
| recursive wrote:
| How could it be actively harmful if it wasn't harmful last
| month when it _was_ the frontier model?
| senko wrote:
| Because you might want to use LLMs _now_. If not, it 's
| definitely better to not chase the hype - ignore the whole
| shebang.
|
| But if you _do_ want to use LLMs for coding _now_ , not using
| the best models just doesn't make sense.
| jonas21 wrote:
| So that you can be using the current frontier model for the
| next 8 months instead of twiddling your thumbs waiting for the
| next one to come out?
|
| I think you (and others) might be misunderstanding his
| statement a bit. He's not saying that using an old model is
| harmful in the sense that it outputs bad code -- he's saying
| it's harmful because some of the lessons you learn will be out
| of date and not apply to the latest models.
|
| So yes, if you use current frontier models, you'll need to
| recalibrate and unlearn a few things when the next generation
| comes out. But in the meantime, you will have gotten 8 months
| (or however long it takes) of value out of the current
| generation.
| properbrew wrote:
| You also don't have to throw away everything you've learnt in
| those 8 months, there's some things that you'll subtly pickup
| that you can carry over into the next generation as well.
| dmk wrote:
| The real insight buried in here is "build what programmers love
| and everyone will follow." If every user has an agent that can
| write code against your product, your API docs become your actual
| product. That's a massive shift.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| I'm very much looking forward to this shift. It is SO MUCH more
| pro-consumer than the existing SaaS model. Right now every app
| feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns,
| enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation. It feels
| like every time I ask for programmatic access to SaaS tools in
| order to simplify a workflow, I get stuck in endless meetings
| with product managers trying to "understand my use case", even
| for products explicitly marketed to programmers.
|
| Using agents that interact with APIs represents people being
| able to own their user experience more. Why not craft a
| frontend that behaves exactly the the way YOU want it to,
| tailor made for YOUR work, abstracting the set of products you
| are using and focusing only on the actual relevant bits of the
| work you are doing? Maybe a downside might be that there is
| more explicit metering of use in these products instead of the
| per-user licensing that is common today. But the upside is
| there is so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark
| patterns, useless upselling, and so on.
| dagss wrote:
| But if you try some penny-saving cheap model like Sonnet [..bad
| things..]. [Better] pay through the nose for Opus.
|
| After blowing $800 of my bootstrap startup funds for Cursor with
| Opus for myself in a very productive January I figured I had to
| try to change things up... so this month I'm jumping between
| Claude Code and Cursor, sometimes writing the plans and having
| the conversation in Cursor and dump the implementation plan into
| Claude.
|
| Opus in Cursor is just so much more responsive and easy to talk
| to, compared to Opus in Claude.
|
| Cursor has this "Auto" mode which feels like it has very liberal
| limits (amortized cost I guess) that I'm also trying to use more,
| but -- I don't really like to flip a coin and if it lands up head
| then waste half hour discovering the LLM made a mess the LLM and
| try again forcing the model.
|
| Perhaps in March I'll bite the bullet and take this authors
| advice.
| written-beyond wrote:
| Just use Codex 5.3 in codex cli, the $20/mo plan is basically
| limitless at least for me and I keep reasoning efforts high.
|
| You can enjoy it while it lasts, OpenAI is being very liberal
| with their limits because of CC eating their lunch rn.
| rmonvfer wrote:
| Yeah, I can't recommend gpt-5.3-codex enough, it's great!
| I've been using it with the new macOS app and I'm impressed.
| I've always been a Claude Code guy and I find myself using
| codex more and more. Opus is still much nicer explaining
| issues and walking me through implementations but codex is
| faster (even with xhigh effort) and gets the job done 95% of
| the time.
|
| I was spending unholy amounts of money and tokens (subsidized
| cloud credits tho) forcing Opus for everything but I'm very
| happy with this new setup. I've also experimented with
| OpenCode and their Zen subscription to test Kimi K2.5 an
| similar models and they also seem like a very good
| alternative for some tasks.
|
| What I cannot stand tho is using sonnet directly (it's fine
| as a subagent), I've found it to be hard to control and
| doesn't follow detailed instructions.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's your flow? Do you have codex write
| plans to markdown files? Just chat? What languages or
| frameworks do you use?
|
| I'm an avid cursor user (with opus), and have been trying
| alternatives recently. Codex has been an immense letdown. I
| think I was too spoiled by cursor's UX and internal
| planning prompt.
|
| It's incredibly slow, produces terribly verbose and over-
| complicated code (unless I use high or xhigh, which are
| even slower), and missed a lot of details. Python/django
| and react frontend.
|
| For the first time I felt like I could relate to those
| people who say it doesn't make them faster," because they
| have to keep fixing the agent's shot, never felt that with
| opus 4.5 and 4.6 and cursor
| emmawirt wrote:
| Curious what you mean by "agent harness" here... are you
| distinguishing between true autonomous agents (model decides next
| step) vs workflows that use LLMs at specific nodes? I've found
| the latter dramatically more reliable for anything beyond
| prototyping, which makes me wonder if the "model improvement" is
| partly better prompting and scaffolding.
| crawshaw wrote:
| Hi, author here. I mean the piece of code that calls the model
| and executes the tool calls. My colleague Philip calls it "9
| lines of code": https://sketch.dev/blog/agent-loop
|
| We have built two of them now, and clearly the state of the art
| here can be improved. But it is hard to push too much on this
| while the models keep improving.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| An agent harness is what enables the user to seamlessly
| interact with both a model and tool calls. Claude Code is an
| agent harness. +----------------------------+
| | User |
| +--------------+-------------+ |
| V +----------------------------+ | Agent
| Harness | | (software interface) |
| +------+--------------+------+ | |
| V V +------------+ +------------+ |
| Models | | Tools | +------------+ +------------+
|
| Here's an example of a harness with less code:
| https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/fdcd9ab783104285764...
| Herring wrote:
| _> In 2000, less than one percent lived on farms and 1% of
| workers are in agriculture. That was a net benefit to the world,
| that we all don 't have to work to eat._
|
| The jury's still out on that one, because climate change is an
| existential risk.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| Existential? Maybe to beachfront property owners
| Herring wrote:
| Everybody gangsta until the permafrost starts leaking massive
| amounts of methane.
| esafak wrote:
| Did you know that 10% of the world's population lives in
| coastal zones at low elevations?
| joefourier wrote:
| The author is correct in that agents are becoming more and more
| capable and that you don't _need_ the IDE to the same extent, but
| I don 't see that as good. I find that IDE-based agentic
| programming actually encourages you to read and understand your
| codebase as opposed to CLI-based workflows. It's so much easier
| to flip through files, review the changes it made, or highlight a
| specific function and give it to the agent, as opposed to through
| the CLI where you usually just give it an entire file by typing
| the name, and often you just pray that it manages to find the
| context by itself. My prompts in Cursor are generally a lot more
| specific and I get more surgical results than with Claude Code in
| the terminal purely because of the convenience of the UX.
|
| But secondly, there's an entire field of LLM-assisted coding
| that's being almost entirely neglected and that's code
| autocomplete models. Fundamentally they're the same technology as
| agents and should be doing the same thing: indexing your code in
| the background, filtering the context, etc, but there's much less
| attention and it does feel like the models are stagnating.
|
| I find that very unfortunate. Compare the two workflows:
|
| With a normal coding agent, you write your prompt, then you have
| to at least a full minute for the result (generally more,
| depending on the task), breaking your flow and forcing you to
| task-switch. Then it gives you a giant mass of code and of course
| 99% of the time you just approve and test it because it's a slog
| to read through what it did. If it doesn't work as intended, you
| get angry at the model, retry your prompt, spending a larger
| amount of tokens the longer your chat history.
|
| But with LLM-powered auto-complete, when you want, say, a
| function to do X, you write your comment describing it first,
| just like you should if you were writing it yourself. You
| instantly see a small section of code and if it's not what you
| want, you can alter your comment. Even if it's not 100% correct,
| multi-line autocomplete is great because you approve it line by
| line and can stop when it gets to the incorrect parts, and you're
| not forced to task switch and you don't lose your concentration,
| that great sense of "flow".
|
| Fundamentally it's not _that_ different from agentic coding -
| except instead of prompting in a chatbox, you write comments in
| the files directly. But I much prefer the quick feedback loop,
| the ability to ignore outputs you don 't want, and the fact that
| I don't feel like I'm losing track of what my code is doing.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The other thing about non-agent workflows is they're much, much
| less compute intensive. This is going to matter.
| dsign wrote:
| Look, I'm very negative about this AI thing. I think there is a
| great chance it will lead to something terrible and we will all
| die, or worse. But on the other hand, we are all going to die
| anyway. Some of us, the lucky ones, will die of a heart attack
| and will learn of our imminent demise in the second it happens,
| or not at all. The rest of us will have it worse. It has _always_
| been like that, and it has only gotten more devastating since we
| started wearing clothes and stopped being eaten alive by a
| savanna crocodile or freezing to death during the first snowfall
| of winter.
|
| But if AI keeps getting better at code, it will produce entire
| in-silico simulation workflows to test new drugs or even to
| design synthetic life (which, again, could make us all die, or
| worse). Yet there is a tiny, tiny chance we will use it to fix
| some of the darkest aspects of human existence. I will take that.
| Krei-se wrote:
| The author has a github.
| 63 wrote:
| I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to
| write good code faster. What I have a problem with is
| inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead
| use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product
| harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack
| of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people,
| but now it's not, so we're flooded with code written by imperfect
| models conducted by people who don't know good from bad.
| codebolt wrote:
| Where are you encountering all this slop code? At my work we
| use LLMs heavily and I don't see this issue. Maybe I'm just
| lucky that my colleagues all have Uni degrees in CS and at
| least a few years experience.
| post-it wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just lucky that my colleagues all have Uni
| degrees in CS and at least a few years experience.
|
| That's why. I was using Claude the other day to greenfield a
| side project and it wanted to do some important logic on the
| frontend that would have allowed unauthenticated users to
| write into my database.
|
| It was easy to spot _for me_ , because I've been writing
| software for years, and it only took a single prompt to fix.
| But a vibe coder wouldn't have caught it and hackers would've
| pwned their webapp.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You can also ask Claude to review all the code for security
| issues and code smells, you'd be surprised what it finds.
| We all write insecure code in our first pass through if
| we're too focused on getting the proof of concept worked
| out, security isnt always the very 1st thing coded, maybe
| its the very next thing, maybe it comes 10 changes later.
| blibble wrote:
| > We all write insecure code in our first pass through
|
| no, we don't
| bowsamic wrote:
| The issue isn't when the programmers start using it. It's
| when the project managers start using it and think that
| they're producing something similar to the programmers
| bdangubic wrote:
| the number of experienced, senior programmers though, who are
| in "anti-LLM" camp, is still fairly staggering.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I mean when the tag line is "this will replace senior
| engineers and you, the senior engineer, _must_ be _forced_ to
| use it "
|
| Then yeah, it makes sense.
| remich wrote:
| We're in a transition phase, but this will shake out in the
| near future. In the non-professional space, poorly built
| vibecoded apps simply won't last, for any number of reasons.
| When it comes to professional devs, this is a problem that is
| solved by a combination of tooling, process, and management:
|
| (1) Tooling to enable better evaluation of generated code and
| its adherence to conventions and norms (2) Process to impose
| requirements on the creation/exposure of PRDs/prompts/traces
| (3) Management to guide devs in the use of the above and to
| implement concrete rewards and consequences
|
| Some organizations will be exposed as being deficient in some
| or all of these areas, and they will struggle. Better
| organizations will adapt.
| etamponi wrote:
| The unfortunate reality is that (1) and (2) is what many,
| many engineers would like to do, but management is going
| EXACTLY in the opposite direction: go faster! Go faster! Why
| are you spending time on these things
| post-it wrote:
| > Agent harnesses have not improved much since then. There are
| things Sketch could do well six months ago that the most popular
| agents cannot do today.
|
| I think this is a neglected area that will see a lot of
| development in the near future. I think that even if development
| on AI models stopped today - if no new model was ever trained
| again - there are still decades of innovation ahead of us in
| harnessing the models we already have.
|
| Consider ChatGPT: the first release relied entirely on its
| training data to answer questions. Today, it typically does a few
| Google searches and summarizes the results. The model has
| improved, but so has the way we use it.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Really? I hardly think it's neglected. The Claude Code harness
| is the only reason I come back to it. I've tried Claude via
| OpenCode or others and it doesn't work as well for me. If
| anything, I would even argue that prior to 4.6, the main reason
| Opus 4.5 felt like it improved over months was the harness.
| uludag wrote:
| > I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so
| many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write
| actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who
| are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.
|
| It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my
| perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many
| developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this
| desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders
| have made their position clear)
|
| Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an
| artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in
| horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all
| the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.
|
| It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech
| workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware
| in the world wouldn't console them.
| overgard wrote:
| I bought Steve Yegge's "Vibe Coding" book. I think I'm about
| 1/4th of the way through it or so. One thing that surprised me
| is there's this naivete on display that workers are going to be
| the ones to reap the benefits of this. Like, Steve was using an
| example of being able to direct the agent while doing leisure
| activities (never mind that Steve is more of an
| executive/thought leader in this company, and, prior to LLMs,
| seemed to be out of the business of writing code). That's a
| nice snapshot of a reality that isn't going to persist..
|
| While the idea of programmers working two hours a day and
| spending the rest of it with their family seems sunny, that's
| absolutely not how business is going to treat it.
|
| Thought experiment... CEO has a team of 8 engineers. They do
| some experiments with AI, and they discover that their
| engineers are 2x more effective on average . What does the CEO
| do?
|
| a) Change the workweek to 4 hours a day so that all the
| engineers have better work/life balance since the same amount
| of work is being done.
|
| b) Fire half the engineers, make the 4 remaining guys pick up
| the slack, rinse and repeat until there's one guy left?
|
| Like, come on. There's pushback on this stuff not because the
| technology is bad, (although it's overhyped), but because the
| no sane person trusts our current economic system to provide
| anything resembling humane treatment of workers. The super rich
| are perfectly fine seeing half the population become
| unemployed, as far as I can tell, as long as their stock
| numbers go up.
| monus wrote:
| > Along the way I have developed a programming philosophy I now
| apply to everything: the best software for an agent is whatever
| is best for a programmer.
|
| Not a plug but really that's exactly why we're building sandboxes
| for agents with local laptop quality. Starting with remote
| xcode+sim sandboxes for iOS, high mem sandbox with Android
| Emulator on GPU accel for Android.
|
| No machine allocation but composable sandboxes that make up a
| developer persona's laptop.
|
| If interested, a quick demo here
| https://www.loom.com/share/c0c618ed756d46d39f0e20c7feec996d
|
| muvaf[at]limrun[dot]com
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