There’s no such thing as “agents”, there must always be a human in the loop, they don’t just create code from nothing. Both in the sense of a human needing to prompt the LLM, and in the fact that they’re trained on human created code. “Agents” is just a buzzword made by tech CEOs and MBAs to make the general population think they’re doing more than they really are. They have no skills, they’re a statistical prediction model. And prediction models tend to fuck up a lot of things, especially as the data window grows.
You can use them to help code, yes, but don’t do what the billionaire class wants and make them seem like more than they really are.
Up until ~6 months ago I would have agreed with you, and elaborated that “Agents are just LLMs in a loop with a text file scratchpad”
That’s… still true in a way, but honestly so many people have put so much cleverness into managing that process, that I have to say, yes, Cline or Codex with GPT or Claude Code behind them are absolutely “agentic”.
I can point them to a problem report and our company documentation and… an ever-increasing percentage of the time, I wind up with a problem description, a patch that fixes it, unit, coverage, and stress tests, and (if relevant) updated docs.
There’s no such thing as “agents”, there must always be a human in the loop, they don’t just create code from nothing. Both in the sense of a human needing to prompt the LLM, and in the fact that they’re trained on human created code. “Agents” is just a buzzword made by tech CEOs and MBAs to make the general population think they’re doing more than they really are. They have no skills, they’re a statistical prediction model. And prediction models tend to fuck up a lot of things, especially as the data window grows.
You can use them to help code, yes, but don’t do what the billionaire class wants and make them seem like more than they really are.
Up until ~6 months ago I would have agreed with you, and elaborated that “Agents are just LLMs in a loop with a text file scratchpad”
That’s… still true in a way, but honestly so many people have put so much cleverness into managing that process, that I have to say, yes, Cline or Codex with GPT or Claude Code behind them are absolutely “agentic”.
I can point them to a problem report and our company documentation and… an ever-increasing percentage of the time, I wind up with a problem description, a patch that fixes it, unit, coverage, and stress tests, and (if relevant) updated docs.