jmcodes

I usually have my main agent write a wrapper command around things like that as it hits them. The wrapper only surfaces the important info, writes the full log to a file, and the agent gets some instructions on using sed and the like to navigate the output.

It seems to work reasonably well.

    - Ask the attendant.
    - Explain the problem.
    - Someone behind you gives you fifty cents.
    - Attendant waves you in.
    - Come back and pay later.
    - Someone nearby helps.

A presentation is a live audio visual medium. If you just want the information as facts with no affect why not read the stats later?

I don't think it necessarily says anything about a model itself having 'taste' in some subjective way.

If the fashion changes would the model update with it without retraining? No. So the model doesn't have 'taste' in that sense. It has alignment to current human definitions of taste.

I've been using LLMs daily and I spun up a few spec driven flows once or twice but like the person above I think the code is the source of truth.

Also why wouldn't you use TDD to enforce the 'spec' then?

- pi-agent or code your own harness, it is not hard.

- codex for now allows you to use it in any harness but if they ever don't open models are catching up

- Reject low quality PRs the same as before. If management doesn't enable to you do that then that's a different problem.

I personally draw the line at plugins that try to set up entire workflows and take the human completely out of the loop. Those are next to useless imo for an engineer who knows what they are doing and are exactly how you end up with crappy code/products.

But to give my thoughts to your points I guess I just don't really care that I can't teach LLMs? It doesn't bother me because I do also still teach people, it's not one or the other.

On what you like about coding. I like that too, I still do it where I want to or where it is needed.

I agree with you on what parts are enjoyable but I guess I don't feel that I'm giving them up? I get to pick the problems I work on that way now. The only disagreement there is around 'clever' shortcuts. I get pleasure out of making things debuggable and traceable for humans.

I wish my odds at gambling were as high as they are with LLM generated code lol.

I do run into the whole 'this session was a waste, need to restart', but like once in a blue moon? Not nearly enough to turn me off from using LLMs daily.

On the teaching point again, my learnings around coding standards, architecture -> problem mapping, how to debug, are applied at the system prompt level and around a few key skill files, so when I say "implement ..." or "I'm seeing this behavior, where in the codebase is the most likely root cause? Why?" It does so close to how I would've done it.

I cannot speak for people who are using these things raw in the harnesses provided by the companies, or god forbid in the browser but you can definitely increase the odds of a good roll enough to be productive by changing the environment around the llm and to me that is the opposite of feeling helpless when it comes to LLMs.

I feel enabled to get more done, at my standards, on my time.

I can pick and choose which parts of the problem deserve my attention and which can be done by the LLM with me just keeping an eye on it while I mostly work on something else. I don't have metrics but I feel like I am doing higher leverage work with less friction.

Setting up the systems around the LLM itself is fun too. Hacking on harnesses and trying to improve the UX or the metrics is fun. Playing with different workflow topologies across agents is fun. Diving deep into context strategies, memory systems, prompting is fun. Trying to marry ideas from the past with what LLMs enable now is fun.

I don't see how this is soulless or unbearable but granted I'm not at a place that is demanding I maximize throughput. That would suck.

Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.

Where it comes in handy has mostly been in distribution honestly. There's something very "open apis web era" about MCP servers where because every company rushed to publish them, you can write a lot of creative integrations a bit more easily.

I don't choose to think random thoughts they appear.

Which is different than thoughts I consciously choose to think and engage with.

From my subjective perspective it is an input into my field of awareness.