| ▲ | sarchertech a day ago |
| He’s not just talking about agents good enough to replace workers. He’s talking about whether agents are currently useful at all. >Overall, the models are not there. I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop. They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that. I’m not sure what’s going on, but we’re at this intermediate stage. The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work. For now, autocomplete is my sweet spot. But sometimes, for some types of code, I will go to an LLM agent. >They kept trying to mess up the style. They’re way too over-defensive. They make all these try-catch statements. They keep trying to make a production code base, and I have a bunch of assumptions in my code, and it’s okay. I don’t need all this extra stuff in there. So I feel like they’re bloating the code base, bloating the complexity, they keep misunderstanding, they’re using deprecated APIs a bunch of times. It’s a total mess. It’s just not net useful. I can go in, I can clean it up, but it’s not net useful. |
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| ▲ | sothatsit a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't think he is saying agents are not useful at all, just that they are not anywhere near the capability of human software developers. Karpathy later says he used agents to write the Rust translation of algorithms he wrote in Python. He also explicitly says that agents can be useful for writing boilerplate or for code that can be very commonly found online. So I don't think he is saying they are not useful at all. Instead, he is just holding agents to a higher standard of working on a novel new codebase, and saying they don't pass that bar. Tbh I think people underestimate how much software development work is just writing boilerplate or common patterns though. A very large percentage of the web development work I do is just writing CRUD boilerplate, and agents are great at it. I also find them invaluable for searching through large codebases, and for basic code review, but I see these use-cases discussed less even though they're a big part of what I find useful from agents. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m not saying he’s saying agents aren’t useful at all. It’s literally in the quotes I provided that he says they are useful for some subset of tasks. I’m saying that he is answering the question “are agents useful at all”. not “can agents replace humans”. His answer is mostly not. He generally prefers autocomplete. But they are useful for some limited tasks. | | |
| ▲ | weatherlite 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I’m not saying he’s saying agents aren’t useful at all I'm not saying you're saying he's saying agents aren't useful at all | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | You’re not the person I’m replying to. The person I’m replying to said >I don't think he is saying agents are not useful at all, just that they are not anywhere near the capability of human software developers. Implying I was supporting the first clause. |
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| ▲ | CaptainOfCoit a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | My biggest takeaway is that agents/LLMs in general are super helpful when paired together with a human who knows the inside and out of software development, who uses it side-by-side with their normal work. They start being less useful when you start treating them as "I can send them ill-specified stuff, ignore them for 10 minutes and merge their results", as things spiral out of control. Basically "vibe-coding" as a useful concept doesn't work for projects you need to iterate on, only for things you feel OK with throwing away eventually. Augmenting the human intellect with LLMs? Usually a increase in productivity. Replacing human coworkers with LLMs? Good luck, have fun. | | |
| ▲ | rhetocj23 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | It does seem pretty clear that an individual who possess super high quality human capital, paired with something like an LLM (provided the LLM is good enough relative to the individual) can be a powerful combination. The issues are: 1) There isnt enough supply of those individuals
2) Such an LLM of that kind doesnt exist (at least not in consistent nature)
3) The amount invested into what is going on will not yield returns commensurate to the required rate of return Interestingly enough, I believe Andrej Karpathy is also focusing on education (levelling up the supply of human capital) - I came to the above conclusion about a month ago. And it 'feels' right to me. |
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| ▲ | consumer451 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am just some shmoe, but I agree with that assessment. My biggest take-away is that we got super lucky. At least now we have a slight chance to prepare for the potential economic and social impacts. |
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| ▲ | Bengalilol a day ago | parent [-] | | I am thinking the same. And we should start considering on what makes us humans and how we can valorize our common ground. | | |
| ▲ | tablatom a day ago | parent [-] | | This. I believe it’s the most important question in the world right now. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this from an entirely practical perspective and have surprised myself that the answer seems to be our capacity to love. The idea is easily dismissed as romantic but when I say I’m being practical I really mean it. I’m writing about it here https://giftcommunity.substack.com/ | | |
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| ▲ | kubb a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| My ever growing reporting chain is incredibly invested in having autonomous agents next year. |
