alt Hacker NewsLove to see these crazy kinds of experiments going on. Even if this doesn't 100% work or is prohibitively expensive for now, these are glimpses into the future in the same way people were talking about coding agents in 2023 when we just had tab complete.
Replies
I am afraid the folks are still busy playing with familiar toys. "Let's extract more code out of LLM's inner layers!" SQLite we already have. That's where their "spec" came from.
The interesting frontier is elsewhere: how to fit it into the pipeline to build new useful things. I felt motivated enough to write a follow-up/reply post http://replicated.live/blog/follow-up
It's cool stuff, but I think mostly in an aspirational way right now. The tired cliche hit on the tired cliche claim will be "but sqlite is in distribution" which will miss the point, that objection dissolves at the precise point where it would have operationalized: novel software of value. Is SQLite in the train set, yeah. Does that matter? Only if someone is willing to pay for Rust SQLite as something other than marketing.
It's cool but I'd rather know what their most successful users are doing, and how they measure that.
It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive because the more you break the work into smaller parts, theoretically the smaller a model can be that completes it.
Therefore your agent swarms don't have to be cutting edge API calls, they can be hosted on clusters of tiny cheap computers with small CPU GPU. For orgs you could basically invest in a local server that has 100s of small computers.
You can use engineers and frontier models to plan and do task subdivision. And then shit that out to the local cluster that's basically handling each small task without knowing what it's supposed to do.
The real issue is the middle. Testing, verifying interconnectivity of mid level abstractions, building that amount of tech debt at such a high rate and actually being aware in any way what it is that you've built.
I think for most MBAs, considering the US and a significant amount of global markets only care about short term market upside, and AI is still in the middle of the hype cycle, that's not a serious issue for anyone who is profit oriented.
It's only a real issue for the losers like you and me who care about sustainability and infrastructure that survives longer than one market hurricane season.