Comment by itmitica

2 days ago

Interesting project.

Interesting readings in the project, such as https://github.com/desplega-ai/advanced-context-engineering-....

I'm not sure why, but I keep trying to reject this, subconsciously. Like, there is something I can't define that is not right.

I think it revolves around two things

No actual future benefits from abandoning the problem solving to a temporary swarm construct that will have a solution ready but potentially having learned nothing from the experience, that could be used in the future.

Shifting the engineering from stable sourcecode and frameworks to ephemeral prompting one-shot-and-done solutions.

Has programming become too meta?

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itmitica

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edg5000  2 days ago

I think the concept can and will work and become the norm, but there is a lot of refinement and first-principles rethinking still needed. The ideas we see today are still unripe and need work. But we are on to something here.

  • tarasyarema  2 days ago

    100%. I believe the best thing to do now is find ways to push the limits of what works and what not, which will help find the following limits, and keep going

tarasyarema  2 days ago

Yes, I spent too much time meta programming while working on desplega.ai (my startup). And I believe currently the best approach is a mix.

Have the swarm work on stuff you could delegate to an intern and basically have the feedback loop with it in slack and github.

On the other hard locally focus on the hard things you want to control.

  • itmitica  2 days ago

    I too was convinced at one point the spec is the program.

    That it doesn't matter the implementation stack.

    But, after wasting too much time in the meta, with nothing really to show for, I returned to controlling the programming process in fine detail. Progressive agentic/vibe coding, if I was to give it a name.

    But it could be that I'm slow to understand how it can be done in a better way.

    • edg5000  2 days ago

      I think this progressive/gentic vide coding would work better if the tools were better and storing the history in a good immutable way, kind of like an email program. I have very valuable sessions where I give the agent a good ephemeral spec, something not sensible to persist in the codebase, but important enough to track it somewhere. Throwing away history is a big no no. Bad GUIs/TUIs discourage from relying on the history. When I close a session, I feel I'm throwing away the history. I keep many terminals open, but eventually have to close them. Tools will get way, way better to facilitate this "general on the frontlines commanding the agents" style of work.