> Is this really a problem with agentic programming?
State management is generally considered a difficult and complex problem. When you give a way for the agent (or a human programmer) to iterate on stuff without having to reset the state, without having to restart anything, without any (manifestly impractical) rituals, the programmer/agent stops guessing and starts empirically assessing the current state of things and reasoning about the problem space in a much tighter loop, procuring solutions that cost fewer tokens, time and effort.
Imagine building something like a Flappy Bird game, and having to recompile whenever you tweak a moving object's trajectory calculation. What would be simpler - having the programmer mess around with values live, or having to re-compile, restart, reset the state to that point, and check where things stand?
Programming with a Lisp REPL often feels like playing a video game. It's not just fun, it makes far better sense (in comparison)
State management is generally considered a difficult and complex problem. When you give a way for the agent (or a human programmer) to iterate on stuff without having to reset the state, without having to restart anything, without any (manifestly impractical) rituals, the programmer/agent stops guessing and starts empirically assessing the current state of things and reasoning about the problem space in a much tighter loop, procuring solutions that cost fewer tokens, time and effort.
Imagine building something like a Flappy Bird game, and having to recompile whenever you tweak a moving object's trajectory calculation. What would be simpler - having the programmer mess around with values live, or having to re-compile, restart, reset the state to that point, and check where things stand?
Programming with a Lisp REPL often feels like playing a video game. It's not just fun, it makes far better sense (in comparison)