Comment by alexpotato
5 hours ago
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 was unsuccessful in area of automation because of different issue.
By trade I am a .Net software developer so as a lot of people would imagine — I was not able to accept a script that wouldn’t be reusable and flexible, basically over engineered.
I do quite some devops so I finally had to accept the fact that I can write simple script with hardcoded values that will live on a server (where I can copy paste and change values to meet other server) and most likely I will not have to look at that script for years as it will be running with cron doing its job without an issue.
Over engineered scripts designed from get go always required debugging from time to time so lots of time I was just doing stuff manually to make it quicker.
So I started winning when I accepted first script can be really simple and when needed I can move it to be parametrized but if not it will just keep doing it's job there on the server.
This is an interesting share, thanks. Yes, that is my mental model. Use coding agents to generate more "programs" (scripts) to automate everything. Have edge case handlers - and these handlers can develop/update the original scripts.
You could even have a decision tree in code where the leaf nodes are primarily "run this script with these params" but some of the leaves are "ask the LLM"