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by mreid 284 days ago
Is it concerning to anyone else that the "Simple & Reliable" and "Reliable on Longer Tasks" diagrams look kind of like the much maligned waterfall design process?
4 comments

One reason it is concerning.

I am mostly worried that I am wrong, in my opinion, that "agents" is a bad paradigm for working with LLMs

I have been using LLMs since I got my first Open AI API key, I think "human in the loop" is what makes them special

I have massively increased my fun, and significantly increased my productivity using just the raw chat interface.

It seems to me that building agents to do work that I am responsible for is the opposite of fun and a productivity sink as I correct the rare, but must check for it, bananas mistakes these agents inevitably make

The thing is, the same agent that made the bananas mistake is also quite good at catching that mistake (if called again with fresh context). This results in convergence on working, non-bananas solutions.
Look up The Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly. Or The King, the Mice and his Cheese

What you propose makes things worse, not better

LLMs are magnificent tools, but there needs to be a human hand holding them.

Nothing I have seen anywhere, yet, challenges my view that "agents" will not be a good idea until we have better technology, that there is no sign of yet (?), than LLMs.

Waterfall is just a better process with agents. Agile is garbage when inserting yourself in the loop causes the system to drop to 10% velocity.
It looks more like alchemy, thb.
To me it seems more like the typical trap of a misfit bounded context.