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by gblargg 16 days ago
You're missing the lack of verification. Normal computer tools can be verified to work reliably. Cat can be tested to copy data. Sort can be confirmed to sort properly. You can't verify that a coding agent can reliably produce code. It's not even easy to check over since the errors aren't something you can systematically find.
1 comments

>Normal computer tools can be verified to work reliably. Cat can be tested to copy data. Sort can be confirmed to sort properly.

Right. You can indeed verify that a given computer program can reliably copy or sort data.

>You can't verify that a coding agent can reliably produce code

That's not the goal. You don't need to verify that a coding agent can reliably produce "code". You only need to verify that the solution produced by the agent solves a given problem. And that's already been done and verified many, many times. I hear most code is written by LLMs nowadays, and not all of their users are idiots.