Thread

1. compiler-guy · 1789906566 · focus · HN ↗

   A sibling comment talks about needing a lot of setup and context for agents to produce good code. That’s both true and bizarre.

   If the compiler that I write produces lousy code, I get bugs that I fix until it doesn’t.

   And that is the most annoying thing about this revolution. It’s obviously powerful and transformative and I use in my job all the time.

   But many, perhaps even most, purveyors seem intent on blaming their users when they have issues, rather than fixing their own bugs.

   General model improvement is going a long way here, but basic things like “ensure you use good style and programming practices” really shouldn’t be a thing users need to put in any .md file.

   1. Jare · 1789907379 · focus · HN ↗

      A programming language spec is expected to be unambiguous. A compiler is expected to be deterministic. There are multiple ways to different outputs when compiling (optimizations, etc) but those are also meant to be well defined and deterministic themselves.

      AIs are stochastic/probabilistic machines. Their big potential is in how they take malformed, incomplete, ambiguous inputs and come up with valuable and usable solutions.

      1. compiler-guy · 1789908218 · focus · HN ↗

         If everyone needs to give them roughly the same set of instructions to get good results, then those instructions should be built in.

         Good defaults are expected in pretty much every other tool.

         And “You just have to set it up carefully and properly” is pretty much saying that the defaults are never good enough.

   2. user43928 · 1789908671 · focus · HN ↗

      You obviously don't need to put such things into .md files.

      They are already present in the harness.

      In my opinion there is all kind of worthless advice going around, including skills or prompts, where the authors have never benchmarked them against clean runs.

      That said, when you are dissatisfied with specific aspects, it can be beneficial to request them as a separate review stage.

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