Comment by netcraft
1 month ago
> Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day.
This is true to an extent for sure and they will go much longer than most engineers without getting "tired", but I've def seen both sonnet and opus give up multiple times. They've updated code to skip tests they couldn't get to pass, given up on bugs they couldn't track down, etc. I literally had it ask "could we work on something else and come back to this"
The glorified autocomplete. Why would the LLM "work on something else then get back on this", is it's subconscious going to solve the problem during that time?
But because people say it, it says it too. Making sense is optional.
Ive found that clearing the context and getting back to it later actually DOES work. When you restart, your personal context is cleared and you might be better at describing the problem you are solving in a more informationally dense way.
not impossible right? the new context can provide some needed hints, etc...
Reminiscent of a time just a year or two ago where the LLMs would get downright frustrated and sassy
Oh, definitely. Also, they end up getting stuck in a loop, adding and removing the same code endlessly.
And then someone comes and "improves" their agent with additional "do not repeat yourself" prompts scattered all over the place, to no avail.
"Asinine" describes my experience perfectly.