alt Hacker NewsI kind of have a different idea of agents. I totally believe in a deterministic scaffold but I really think that an agent should be as deterministic as possible - the more code, the better.
Think of a typical loop we may ask of Claude Code today (assume we are not using TDD): run some test suite with fail fast mode, diagnose if the failure is due to recent feature changes (pass reference to backend/frontend, github issues, PRD,...). Ask CC to decide if test failed due to feature change and then update the test. Perhaps ask CC to use sub-agent to investigate and fix (if deemed so). Commit each fix, move on to next.
I know, this has so many ways to make blunder but I am talking about the agent here, not our error-prone test maintenance. What if we had an agent that had context of your codebase, deterministically ran test suite, linter, hooks, etc. The "English" prompt would become a code loop with the LLM only brought in to decide if a test has failed because of feature change. Also, we can extract git log, JIRA and what not.
Each tool here is real code. Executable code that calls others and only prompts when they meet edge cases. Edge cases are defined but we can now accelerate the maintenance of these tools using agents themselves. But the system is built on "programs that do one thing and do it well" and then reach out to an LLM for its specific edge case. The agent is how these executables work with each other.
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I’m definitely on the deterministic code train as well. All of my success for long running tasks has been around wrapping the agentic harness (cc, codex-cli, etc.) in a deterministic workflow with deterministic gates. We need a name for this outer layer. In my mind that is the true harness because it constrains the agents failure mode. I think flow engineering has been proposed. Maybe it’s the agentic exoskeleton?
100% agree that the more deterministic code the better up to the limit where you need the LLM's ability to be non-deterministic to kick in.
There is this ACM blog post called "Manual Work is a Bug" [0] that was originally written to help humans automate processes using code. I find it just as applicable today as when it was written. You and the LLM look at what has to be done and then figure out the scripts/tools to make it happen. You then tie those tools into a system.
The more I use the above the more it makes sense and the worse the whole "just commit the prompt" seems like nonsense.
I know it's a type of blasphemy here, but deterministic workflows such as what you describe is where langgraph really shines imo.
I don't think we're necessarily in disagreement here: I agree that determinism should be taken as far as possible, but once we zoom out of the software engineering world I think things tend to get a lot less easy to automate if that makes sense.