> It’s actually fine if agents make a lot of boneheaded mistakes. What’s not ok is if they keep making the same mistakes.
I worked in life sciences for a bit. There is a process in clinical trials called corrective and preventative actions (CAPA). You'll also find this in other areas where failure tolerance is low (e.g. aircraft).
It's simple: when a mistake happens, you run your CAPA process (Google CAPA form and see examples to extrapolate what that process might look like) and determine the root cause and the correction to the process that allowed the mistake to happen in the first place.
(At least as a SaaS vendor in life sciences, when we had a CAPA (e.g. after a SEV0 failure), it would be folded into our SOPs and then we would be required to retrain on the SOP. Auditors would want to see our evidence of CAPAs, the versions of our SOPs, the records of training. All to extreme for most shops, but I add this for context/color)
This is something most eng shops do not have the discipline for since it requires some diligence.
Should it be fully agentic? Should there be human intervention here to approve the CAPA? Open questions to be answered.
Honestly I feel like I'm taking crazy pills these days.
Write a program! If it has a bug, debug it and update the program. Use an LLM to debug it if you must. If you're doing something repeatable, then use a traditional automation scheme.
If an LLM has to handle a subsection of the program, so be it. Just wrap that part with clean inputs and outputs.
Why does it feel like we've forgotten how to automate things?
> Why does it feel like we've forgotten how to automate things?
everybody is too busy everyday fighting fires to garden all those standard automations; its much "easier" to just throw it at an llm and move on (just saying what i see)
CharlieDigital · · focus · HN ↗
It's simple: when a mistake happens, you run your CAPA process (Google CAPA form and see examples to extrapolate what that process might look like) and determine the root cause and the correction to the process that allowed the mistake to happen in the first place.
(At least as a SaaS vendor in life sciences, when we had a CAPA (e.g. after a SEV0 failure), it would be folded into our SOPs and then we would be required to retrain on the SOP. Auditors would want to see our evidence of CAPAs, the versions of our SOPs, the records of training. All to extreme for most shops, but I add this for context/color)
This is something most eng shops do not have the discipline for since it requires some diligence.
Should it be fully agentic? Should there be human intervention here to approve the CAPA? Open questions to be answered.
jayd16 · · focus · HN ↗
Write a program! If it has a bug, debug it and update the program. Use an LLM to debug it if you must. If you're doing something repeatable, then use a traditional automation scheme.
If an LLM has to handle a subsection of the program, so be it. Just wrap that part with clean inputs and outputs.
Why does it feel like we've forgotten how to automate things?
andrekandre · · focus · HN ↗