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SkyPuncher 5 hours ago

I don't really get this. At this point, my limiting factor is not how quickly Claude can self-trudge through code. It's whether Claude is going to do the task correctly or not.

I need more mechanisms for controlling long-running sessions and dynamically injecting my thoughts, correction, and nudges rather than faster ways to burn through my tokens without knowing if the results are going to be correct.

wrs 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the theoretical answer here is this:

"Agents address the problem from independent angles, other agents try to refute what they found, and the run keeps iterating until the answers converge."

So you will be supplying the "ground truth" (test suite, detailed spec, whatever) and empower an agent to use it to guide the other agents. Currently a lot of people do this sequentially in the form of multiple code-review passes by fresh agent sessions looking at the work of previous sessions.

Adversarial models are a longstanding technique in ML so it makes sense they would try to go this way.

vadansky 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know, maybe I'm doing it wrong but I feel LLMs add a slop debt, and each agent pass just exuberates it.

Like I had an LLM implement a spec and said it was done... Except it had a ton of `casts` everywhere. Okay, my bad, I should have been clear "NO CASTS", so I use the LLM to remove the casts, except it just kept making things more and more complicated and ugly.

It took me taking a break and having a shower thought to realize all the ugliness is because one type should have been broken up into 2, which would remove a ton of generics and code. But Claude never suggested that, it was always "we need at least one cast here, or we need 1000 LOC of generic factories". I tried multiple new sessions with various prompts too.

Maybe one day soon LLMs could pay off their own slop debt but at least right now I don't trust them to write code unseen.

Edit: Maybe the correct action should have been to delete everything and make it re-write everything from scratch with the clear "NO CASTS EVER" rule. But still the point is feels like having LLM clean up after an LLM doesn't work well enough to just have keep it in a loop and never look at what it does.

highwaylights 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This matches my experience.

I've had to put a fair chunk of effort in to skills that will run deterministic mechanisms to unslop a codebase (cyclomatic complexity grading has been really helpful here) as invariably some amount of guidance around principles will be missed over time. I've found it does help, though. Certainly I'm getting overall better results from Flash and Sonnet over multiple runs for fairly modest token increases. GPT 5.5 less so, but that's because it scores better in a first pass. I won't really know until I gauge it at the end of my sub month which has been more cost efficient for me all things considered.

vinnymac 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that we have an ever growing and large number of constraints, and not following even a single one means the result is sloppy.

I don’t see them fixing this any time soon, and thus human in the loop is a requirement to use these tools effectively. That is unless you love your slot machine dopamine rush enough to ignore quality gates and respect for your peers time.

zmj 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you want hard rules, use deterministic tools. Prompts are for fuzzy guidance.

tomjakubowski 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been reading writing Rust for a long while now, since before 1.0. I'm capable of critically evaluating Rust code. I'm also a happy Claude Code user, mostly for lightweight uses like generating scaffolding, prototyping, and debugging.

The pure LLM, no human intervention vibe-coded PRs on Bun since the vibe-rewrite to Rust contain the worst coding horrors I've seen in 20 years of programming.

Setting aside the quality of the change itself (I would have done it differently, for sure: it is pretty straightforward to build a safe abstraction out of this type), the utterly pointless "source-text consistency test" added here is easily the worst example of "test repeats implementation" I have seen in my career:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30728/files#diff-863477b...

implexa_founder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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

> Currently a lot of people do this sequentially in the form of multiple code-review passes by fresh agent sessions looking at the work of previous sessions.

Up until now I've used a review loop approach, where within a Claude Code session I just tell it to spawn three review sub-agents, each with context of what's going on and instructions to look over all of the changed code in search for serious/critical issues, but otherwise a more fresh look at things. It works really well for the most part (token usage aside): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277011

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

Doesn't help if the wrong design is implemented correctly.

tsunamifury 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ground truth is not consensus, it has to be graded against what actually works for the original goal. Plenty of scenarios with AI and Humans can result in consensus around incorrectness.

adamtaylor_13 5 hours ago | parent [-]

While pedantically correct, I think the comment above assumed that you've correctly specified the work. If you can't correctly specify your work, AI agents are just going to help you get a non-solution faster.

tsunamifury 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't coding the act of specificying the work to a processor? And AI agents are supposed to bridge the gap with intelligence from less specificed to more specified or possibly even more intelligent and alternate implementations?

wrs 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What I meant by "ground truth" is that it is not fuzzy, not AI-evaluated, and not a consensus. The test suite passes or it doesn't. The codebase lints or it doesn't. The performance improved or it didn't.

An agent can help you create the specification, but it's up to you to know whether it's correctly testing that you got the result you wanted.

adamtaylor_13 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep. And yet, there's still some level of specification you have to do.

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

Yes, that, accuracy, speed, and single computer-use.

I find those to be the limiting factors to speed.

I have extensive rules, I do extensive planning. Yet at implementation, the rules are not respected, errors are introduced, etc...

I spend more time fixing than writing code.

Then speed... Because of the fixes and bad code quality even with frontiers model speed makes a very big difference. I (agents) spend hours daily doing reviews and fixes. 5x speed boost would make me much more productive.

And when working super fast with agents, having only one computer is limiting. Even worktrees don't solve problems because I use things like convex, chrome use, etc... and it conflicts with each others all the time.

Still many problems to solve. It's already evolved so much in the last two years.

eggplantemoji69 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is my experience. Quantity of output is not the issue right now. Quality is. But I’m not sure if this will ever be solved for, given LLMs are non-deterministic sophisticated autocomplete at their core.

Sure, ‘human in the loop’ and all that jazz, but I feel like my knowledge suffers even with this approach. I have to use llms w pinpoint focus to get decent results.

The original copilot completions behavior might be peak llm performance for coding, sans having an agent write boilerplate and such.

root-parent 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When this is all finished and done, these coding models will allow you to rewrite the linux kernel in rust, recode Kubernetes in assembly, and create your own web framework in 10 min.

But each prompt will cost your company, 10 to 15 million dollars. An extra 20 million if you ask them to review the code and improve the comments.

chinathrow 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think for now it's better to convert tokens into code/library code and then work with that for deterministic results rather than relying on Claude being correct or not.

jascha_eng 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yes I agree with this, more granular going back, letting me interrupt where it went off the rails, or even editing file reads myself etc would be lovely. Ingesting parts of other conversations would also be cool!

dude250711 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have heard of "token-maxxing" but I have not heard of "correctness-maxxing" or "quality-maxxing".

mirashii 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not with those exact terms, but it is certainly being discussed. Wes McKinney said in a recent talk that with current coding agents there’s no longer an excuse for shipping suboptimal code that takes on tech debt. Writing tests has never been cheaper, writing custom fuzzers, linters, and other harnesses that serve as guardrails has never been cheaper. His take is that “we didn’t have enough engineering time to do it right” is no longer an excuse, and the only excuses left are that you don’t know any better or you have bad taste.

encoderer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The answer for me has been actually more tokens, and create even more layers of automated verification

Jarred 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dynamic workflows, in my experience, make Claude more effective at complex long-running tasks. They help precisely with getting Claude to do the task correctly.

It feels more like a bespoke build system for the specific task/project than prompting a freeform chat.

aloknnikhil 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As long as agents are fuzzy (which they will continue to be with the Transformers architecture), the need to validate will continue to exist. I cannot imagine merging code without at least 1 human review.

MeetingsBrowser 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've used agents quite a bit and I agree.

The current baseline workflow is something like agent output -> human review -> agent refinement -> human review -> agent refinement -> ...

But agents are capable of making meaningful improvements to their own output. I'm hoping dynamic workflows move towards something like:

agent output -> agent review -> agent refinement -> (cycle to fixed point) -> final human review

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