Comment by imtringued
11 hours ago
This is correct. People seem to get the wrong idea about why agentic coding is even a thing in 2026. The naive AI techno optimist which has basically displaced the vast majority of opinions on HN, thinks that the models got "smarter" [0]. No, the training distribution shifted towards training on agentic sessions which made certain forms of agentic coding "in-distribution".
We are still witnessing the same underlying problems of transformers.
[0] Think back to all the publicity stunts like the Hugging Face. They are meant to convince you that the agents have somehow progressed past the transformer limitations when those publicity stunts are actually expressions of transformer limitations.
There's a widespread perception that models are worse for prose and creative writing now. That would track.
You think the hugging face incident was a stunt? Can you explain?
OpenAI started fearmongering way back with GPT 2, arguing that model was too dangerous to release freely. That model was barely coherent enough for using it as a twitter bot. Anthropic just hopped onto that later. Conveniently, calling for regulation now would ease the competition from open Chinese models, opening the chance for both companies to eventually reach positive ROI, with consumers paying the price.
The burden of proof that this isn't just a publicity stunt again is squarely on them.
[dead]
yea, plus they have been rlhf'ed to an inch of their lives as well. hard to tell if frontier models can solve more problems because of that or not.