Comment by devmor
15 days ago
If you’re using LLMs for agentic work it is absolutely essential that you have a robust set of tools for them to use and the correct instructions to prompt their use.
The LLM will come up with stupid ways to do things, common sense doesn’t exist for AI.
Isn't this the whole reason they became viable in the last 6 months? The system prompt and harness is improving. It's less and less essential every day to roll your own.
I don't think there is a single reason. Models are improving, so are the harnesses, prompts and we who use them a lot also get more proficient and learn where they can be used effectively vs not, so lots of improvements all over the ecosystem, brought together.
Latest big change is probably how feasible local models are becoming, like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4, they're no longer easily getting stuck in loops and repetition, although on lower quantizations they still pretty much suck for agentic usage.
> we who use them a lot also get more proficient and learn where they can be used effectively vs not
I think it’s always been obvious where an LLM could be used effectively and where it cannot, if you understand how they work and don’t see them as magical.
The “increase in proficiency” is mostly people coming back to reality and being more intentional about LLM usage. There are no surprise discoveries here. One does not need to use an LLM a lot to get effective with them. A total noob could become effective on day 1 with proper guidance.
5 replies →
The models also have far more intelligence built in. For example, the pi.dev agent harness has a system prompt which fits on a single page, and includes only 4 or 5 tools. Running with a small coding model like Qwen3.6 27B, this setup is completely capable of agentic coding.
They still aren't viable. Nothing changed within the last 6 months.
My favorite is when Claude will build a completely new application to load and inspect a .dll file using reflection instead of just googling the library's interfaces.
It did this for during one of the recent outrage periods. It was unjarring deps left and right instead of googling for it. What an easy way for me to own the tokenmaxxing leaderboard I remember thinking
“Use all of the tools at your disposal, including searching the internet” is my claude-specific common instruction.