[blcknight]

The gulf is bridgeable. The problem is that a lot of people are building agents without strong enough judgment layers around them. Work that can be verified with reasonable accuracy are the sweet spot right now.

[wonnage]

This is much harder than it sounds. Most techniques I’ve seen end up using separate agents to do the planning, implementation, and judging.

The elaborate workarounds you have to build to help an agent which fundamentally doesn’t know what it’s doing reminds me of this old blog post about TDD: https://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-...

IMO present technology is tailored for an experienced developer to give agents manageable tasks that can be one-shot. The marketing right now reminds me of the 90s when AskJeeves promised natural language search when the technology was fundamentally still stuck in keyword search, and learning to craft a search query for Google is today’s prompt engineering

[Avicebron]

How many of these layers are just trying to rediscover/rebuild the idempotence of code?

[ben_w]

> The gulf is bridgeable.

Only with an LLM that's actually at agent-quality.

If "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" are two rungs on a ladder, the rung before them is "useful autocomplete". Autocomplete that only gets the next token right 90% of the time won't give you compiling code.