HN user
It's crazy how much better you can make LLM output just by asking "is this the most elegant solution?" In a loop
(Not fine tuning, but interesting none the less. If a model can so easily find a more elegant solution, why didn't it pick that in the first place?)
Written language is deep tech itself. There's evidence it changed our brain morphology even. So ya it deeply affected kids abilities, for example memorizing long poems or whatever.
Digital tech is here to stay...
It's a skill set just like coding. You can embrace an elevated workflow where you can forget about the specific syntax and focus on the architecture and integration. It takes time to intuit what exactly the models are bad at, so you can forsee hallucinations and prevent them from happening in the first place. Yes you can write 1 line faster than Claude, but what about 10 lines? 100? 1000?
I guess they are assuming LLMs will just get better and better until youn don't look at code at all.
Ignoring the fact that software will just keep getting more and more complex and interconnected... There will always be a new frontier or code and UX
Sure... A good harness can be built in 1 day tho. A good model is 1000x more sophisticated
I've been running a custom harness in production for months (code gen on cloud boxes), it's quite simple (<500 LOC). The model can use sed or other nice bash tricks to efficiently read. U really don't need any tool besides bash plus a good system prompt. Subagents are the same as the main agent (end with a summary). U can just remove tool results (oldest first) to save context, the model can read again if it needs to. High quality memory is the only difficult part. But that can also be solved with high quality documentation
And? I just joined HN and I like coding with AI. Is it a problem to have a different opinion from you?
" The real value in the AI ecosystem isn’t the model or the harness — it’s the integration of both working seamlessly together. "
Wut? The value in the ecosystem is the model. Harnesses are simple. Great models work nearly identically in every harness
So true... I get more mileage from just watching an agent work than building sophisticated LLM-as-judge workflows
Slop becomes impossible to maintain, and eventually product velocity slows down. Maybe it's ok for an ultra simple todo app, but for most apps code quality absolutely matters... Users expect snappy UX and all the new bells and whistles.
Why did Whatsapp grow so big while thousands of previous chat apps didn't code quality (scalability)
How is this different from previous layers of abstraction? React/JS dev don't have to think about memory management or a million other things that C++ application devs did. Instead that cognitive load is unbundled onto the framework maintainers, and frontend devs can be much more productive.
Obviously react/js didn't cause job apocalypse... Quite the opposite. It's just another abstraction layer making it possible to build a full application with less text. Prompts are the same pattern again IMO
There's too much value in familiar UX. "Don't make the user think" is the golden rule these days. People used to have mental bandwidth for learning new interfaces... But now people expect uniformity