4 karma · joined March 12, 2026
Given a long haul goal with instructions and everything they will reinvent the wheel four times and one of those you will get a square. Reminds me of that monkey paw wish thing. You look at your finished app. Looks beautiful, but its inner workings are a ball of confusion.
So this AI Agent... It is much faster at doing code when given specific instructions. But it keeps loosing context on architecture, and i cant really let it build complex things with interdependencies that build on each other. At times it feels like doing pair programming with a guy who is so crazy fast that im left behind with my head spinning, wondering how we just jumped from a hello world to a working thing that would have taken me ten iterations. And i get a bad feel when i then wonder how is this app doing what it does? because my agent cant explain it, and i would be stupid to believe what it hallucinated because it sounds really solid until you scratch the construction.
At the beginning i was almost euphoric about my new friend, now im sometimes disappointed, sometimes confused, but i am learning to give better, more concise instructions, to do smaller development jumps. It is tempting to set a long haul goal and let it do. But, i think for now, even if it is much faster at the small things, it would be also faster to build a catastrophic spaghetti code nightmare if not used with great care.
Enjoyers of journey vs Enjoyers of journey destination! you gave me something to think about.
These past months I've been working with two agents developing two things practically in parallel. And i've experienced the fastest, most motivating development sessions i ever had. Together with these two agents i was able to build two very complex systems that use all sorts of data gathering, then ETL into a format that can be queried and maintained, and it all ends up in some awesome web UIs. I used Them not only to write code, but to do the design and architecture, discussed the front end, the business reqs.
And what i can say, is that it felt like a conversation with a crazy fast person who did everything i needed in seconds. AS a tech guy i know what i want and i know how to describe it. That helped A LOT! I know when we lost context and yes, there were stupid consequences that we had to fix. But my impression is that many of these things i see criticized here refer to the people using it, less than to the AI and its output. From my point of view, the output is what i wanted, only 250x faster than i ever expected. And for the critiques targeting the AIs, after this i am sure that they will learn to fill in all those gaps. We will not be criticizing then. By then my only possible job will be to translate somebody's business reqs for an agent to implement as i speak.
The risk, in my opinion was the opposite of I'd expected — not learning less, but a lot of shallow things giving an impression of learning which in effect isnt there. Look! i built this powerful thing. 60.000 Lines of coded business logic in a week! On the surface i have something impressive to show. People admire it, and i end up believing that i did it. This is not to say that i did not learn - i did, but my learning was not as impressive as the result would make you believe.
Maybe i should try using it to learning Math now.
And i want to build an agent capable to do automated investment. so, to the question "has" anyone...?" i believe yes, my role model is Jim Simons from Renaissance. He did.
Also, I had to do several refactorings of my agent's constructs and found out that one of them was reinventing stuff producing a plethora of function duplications: e.g. DB connection pools(i had at least four of them simultaneously).
Would AXE require shared state between chained agents? Could it do it if required?
Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be best? And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again trying to find the best words here.
Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be heard.
I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about other peoples opinions.
The action taxonomy approach is interesting. Curious whether context policies work well in practice — what does "depends on the target" look like when the target is ambiguous? E.g. a temp file in /opt/myapp/ that happens to be load-bearing.
The freeze-then-capture approach is interesting. Curious how it handles pages with aggressive anti-bot detection that fingerprints headless Chromium forks — that's the other failure mode I keep hitting.
The RSS question: yes, RSS is useful precisely because it's composable. It works with anything. Direct alerts are convenient but RSS is infrastructure.
The hard part for a new user who knows about VMs isn't the VM setup — it's knowing which model to reach for. Opus for complex reasoning, Sonnet for balanced tasks, Haiku for high-volume classification or anything where you're calling the API repeatedly in a loop. Getting that wrong is where bills explode.
A sensible default for a hosted product like Klaus would be Sonnet with Haiku available for bulk operations. Opus should require an explicit opt-in with a cost warning.