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TheDong 4 hours ago

I'm a little less charitable.

Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply.

If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color".

They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.

The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.

You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.

Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.

Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.

recursivecaveat 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I'm less sympathetic when you are bothering other humans by spamming them and asking them to do legwork for you.

yvdriess 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Hanging out in programming language IRC channels (quakenet shoutout) makes you realize pretty quickly why experts in said channels and newsgroups are such irritable grumps whenever someone asks a question that smells like homework assignment.

I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was "I don't want to explain to you why I want to do it like this. Just tell me how to do this!"

ma2kx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At least he learnt not to provide an LLM presumably unrestricted access to his AWS account.

internet_points an hour ago | parent [-]

from OP:

> It's unfortunate to see that the operator's takeaway from this incident is that "next time a better agent is needed".