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SwellJoetoday at 9:19 PM1 replyview on HN

Inventing a new thing "for agents" always feels counter-productive. Your new thing isn't in the training data, so you have to teach it how to use your thing. Why not use tech that's already in the training data? Agents know Python and Django. Or, better (because the performance, maintainability, and deployment story are much nicer with no extra work, since agents write the code), agents know Go.

The very nature of LLMs means you can't invent a thing for current agents to use that they'll be better at using than the things they already know how to use from their immense training data. You can give them skills, sure, and that's useful, but it's still not their native tongue.

To make a thing that's really for agents, you need to have made a popular thing for humans ten years ago, so there's a shitload of code and documentation for them to train on.


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mritchie712today at 9:46 PM

this was true a year ago, but if you give an agent a new spec to follow (e.g. a .md file), it will follow it.

we have a custom .yaml spec for data pipelines in our product and the agent follows it as well as anything in the training data.

while I agree you don't need to build a new thing "for agents", you can get them to understand new things, that are not in the training data, very easily.

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