Since agents became good enough to write low-stakes software without you needing to validate the code they write yourself, I've been experimenting with several different ways to build tools for myself on demand. If I'm working on a PC, the overhead required to scaffold a CLI, webapp, or even native...
One of the most limiting factors of LLM agents is they have limited cross-session memory. When working on software projects, this limitation isn't much of an issue because the agent can search the project and read files to understand the current state and what it needs to do to make the changes...
What is it to build software with coding agents? It's something distinctly different than writing code by hand.
In 2022, I had recently started a new job as a software engineer. As usual, there were a lot of new things to learn and one of those was getting comfortable working in a programming language that I hadn't used professionally before.
I enjoy writing. Most of my writing here is about software and technology, but lately I've been struggling.
This year was another year of wild change in technology and software engineering. It felt like the year flew by yet so much happened during it.
Working with coding agents has been a dance of context management. These days, if an agent loop isn't producing the result I want, it's more often than not a problem of context rather than a shortcoming of the language model or agent scaffold/harness.
Have you ever observed someone try and demonstrate how they use a coding agent? The presenter will usually introduce the concept of an agent, discuss the idea of a software harness wrapping a language model, and then will show an example of how it works.
I was not planning on writing about this but after reading Sascha's post, I decided it could be interesting because his demonstration on what it takes to build knowledge happened to relate to prompting a language model for a fitness routine: This drives us to one of the most important conclusions...
A short, fast rollercoaster
I've run Thought Eddies as a more dynamic, experimental blog since the beginning of this year. I'd heard about Astro and wanted to put a more personal touch on my web presence.