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by bigcat12345678 24 days ago
My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:

1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry

2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.

3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.

4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.

WDYT?

1 comments

> Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents

Why would that be different?

Because agents is different than conventional software:

1. They behave differently: non-deterministic vs deterministic

2. They have different mechanism: harness+llms vs codes+apis

3. They have different interfaces: clicking vs chatting

They are like boston dynamics robots vs humans

Pi is just the harness. I think in case of the article that is what they mean when they say agent.

You can write one in 200 lines of code. Just a TUI for an api.