From the first sentence

> I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem

You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.

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xeyownt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What a poor explanation.

With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force.

When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.

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chrisjj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.

	▲	rcxdude 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		At a certain level of abstraction, yes.

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zzzeek an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I just don't think that's correct. When I ask Claude to solve something for me, it takes a number of actions on my computer which are neither writing text nor interpreting the done token. It executes the build, debugs tests, et cetera. Sometimes it spawns mini-mes when it thinks that would be helpful! I think saying this is all "autocomplete" is a category error, like saying that you shouldn't talk about clicking buttons or running programs because it's all just electrically charged silicon under the hood.

	▲	happygoose an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		technically, it does all that by outputting text, like `run_shell_command("cargo build")` as part of its response. But you could easily say similar things about humans. To me, "autocomplete" seems like it describes the purpose of a system more than how it functions, and these agents clearly aren't designed to autocomplete text to make typing on a phone keyboard a bit faster. I feel like people compare it to "autocomplete" because autocomplete seems like a trivial, small, mundane thing, and they're trying to make the LLMs feel less impressive. It's a rhetorical trick that is very overused at this point.
	▲	zzzeek an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		yup, or "I played a first person shooter and shot lots of bad guys" wrong! pushed buttons on your playstation in response to graphical simulations, duh