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Comment by poeticsilence | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! if you can think of any other large wins that you didn't mention, that'd be great; but those 5x numbers... that's brutal. I can understand the communications overhead of agent swarms; I'd love to know where the 5x is mostly going between human in the loop and not.

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Without a human in the loop LLMs tend to brute force things they don't understand.

To be fair to them, if they have an expected output this can be exactly what you need.

They've been super useful to me when comparing datasets during a porting process.

But if they don't have that loop, then they make assumptions and build towers of madness on top of said assumptions.

Towers of madness... that's absolutely perfect. I'm stealing that. This has happened so many times that it lives as a concept in my head but it never got a label. Thank you.

This is most apparent when you can see the actual thinking tokens, not the sanitised versions that the US labs show.

Fundamentally if I am paying for these tokens, I should be able to see them but that's not where we are right now.

Interesting, no? You pay for something, but they won't let you audit what you are actually paying for.

Yeah, but the Chinese might see them! \s

Like, it's wild to me seeing majority Chinese ML teams for years in the Bay and elsewhere that suddenly in the LLM space they are only capable of competing by stealing the hard stolen goods of our frontier US developers.

And people lap it up. And every Chinese advance - also made public, usually through papers - is implemented immediately by Western companies. Some of these are big steps forward and could have possibly been patented but they just share.

And the naming... 'Anthropic' & 'OpenAI' are such misnomers, that's not an accident.

Largely bad pathways that aren't being caught in time.

Inefficient commands, for example I launched a bunch of agents for a task and for every command they'd first try it inside a sandbox, wait for the command to fail (sometimes that meant a timeout!) then retry outside the sandbox.

Now do that hundreds of times.

Or just crap like type checking the entire repo again and again.

If you have really tight rein on your agents you can prevent these sorts of issues, but you won't see these issues unless you are carefully monitoring what they are doing to the level of watching cli output scroll by.

Of course at some point the agent.md file needed to keep the stupid away gets so long that adherence drops.

You also end up with just stupid shit. I gave Sol too much free reign and it decided to update my DB schema to save stack traces to a DB.

Code which it then wrote a bunch of tests for. And then used a browser use agent to manually test.

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