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  • Hacker News
  • There are so many other factors. Will people be pissed if they expected your output and got AI slop instead? Will you lose context on something that you really need to understand?
    by apical_dendrite
  • This post seems to be created out of thin air rather than real experience and data
    by _davide_
  • Should the best agents be bottlenecked by the least verifable part of the workflow?
    by h2aichat
  • This is a very long form way of saying “understand the work you are dispatching, and if you don’t, ask questions until you do”
    by SOLAR_FIELDS
  • > “understand the work you are dispatching, and if you don’t, ask questions until you do”

    My rant about this, not directed to the commenter but in general:

    I wish people would have been so interested on discussing and planning with teammates like they seem with AI tools.

    Because this is nothing new. Communication, knowing what you are doing, planning... was already a mandatory step for any engineering task.

    And if people that use planning with AI then ignore their teammates, other teams, etc. then it is time to reconsidering their way of working.

    by Frieren
  • How do you draw the line between a human review at level 1 and a human safety gate at level 2?
    by ChulioZ
  • I work on my MacBook in direct terminal sessions or in a container with no safeguards.

    I save the container for well-planned units of work that can easily be repeated and validated on a branch.

    I use direct sessions when I expect and the plan dictates that Claude might go off target and I need to hold the steering wheel.

    Fable has increased my use of the container option.

    by ChicagoDave
  • I find agents are definitely useful as a blind audit/adversarial attack on a set of changes. A more comprehensive prompt, but in essence "go come up with a set of changes you'd make to achieve -set of requirements and then compare to what has actually been done and report back". I have CC so am more liberal with this towards the end my week when I have spare tokens!

    Edit: I have no clue if they earn their tokens, but as I get them 'free' on the sub I haven't needed to evaluate.

    by Incipient
  • I have never once delegated anything to an agent and my life is still going on. Funny how that goes.
    by ulfw
  • Interesting. When it comes to auditing, I think there is also another layer to be verified - the intent. We have tooling for static analysis and automated tests, but drift in intent or vision is hard to detect.

    After leaving agents unsupervised for longer periods of time, the biggest questions tend to be "how did it arrive at this conclusion?" and "did we drift from the initial vision?". Typically these questions are hard to answer as you only review the final state of the workflow.

    I recently built an issue tracker that does offer time-traveling as a core feature. Somewhat unexpectedly this turned out to provide a much sought for overview allowing for a better workflow audit, as detailed here: https://dev.to/ljtn/vision-drift-addressing-the-next-problem...

    Would be interested to hear your thoughts. I guess vision drift would classify as something that is hard to reverse, because you often don't realize it has happened until much later.

    by jolaflow
  • Would behaviour driven development be helpful here?
    by steve1977
  • I see vision drift happen routinely in most (all) human led projects.
    by ithkuil
  • This post is full of things opposite of what I've found. An agent (claude code at least) will certainly refactor feature flags better than I ever could and is less likely to miss special cases. What the agent struggles with is business knowledge - context I hold in my head as a human communicating with other humans and working on a codebase over a long period of time.
    by parasti
  • That's true. But we always desired that more business knowledge be shared in written form between humans (people come and go, work across time zones, ...).

    Presumably agents can both help maintaining/mediating such communication and also benefit from the context they acquire through that

    by ithkuil
  • One of the main problems I face is that business knowledge is not explicitly written down and formulated. No matter how much you describe something in human text format those are not formal rules about how something should work. If you can't inspect the output of the LLM you do not have full understanding of the business.

    Most "classic" computer systems (code that runs on a CPU) are not strictly formal[1], but they are orders of magnitude more formal than human language.

    [1] things like distributed systems, memory corruption, performance characteristics, etc can make a system behavior not predictable

    by DanielHB