Comment by mccoyb
3 hours ago
There's several things I disagree with in this post (a matter of perspective, I think):
> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
I agree with the frustration here :)
> You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
Perhaps the people who weren't inclined to think about compilers, type systems, and logic before coding agents will never think about those things. If anything, I think about those systems significantly more now, because I view them as ways to describe the search space for the agent ... and perhaps, in the future, even tools to structure agentic latent representations.
So I propose rotating your viewport: yes, perhaps entertain the idea that it doesn't make sense to think about these things for human consumption ... but instead, what if we think of programming language and compiler design as being a tool to control the search space, and suddenly there's lots of new ways to think about these things.
Is this a valuable way to think? I'm not sure, but we should try and find out.
I agree with you and disagree with the OP in similar ways.
I work on my own "agentically-engineered" projects and the pursuit of certain ideas for what you're calling intrinsic motivation, and I don't particularly care if others find it interesting or even find it at all or not, because the ideas themselves are cool to me.
It's kind of like I can suddenly tinker at 2,000% efficiency and share what I'm doing, _and if someone else finds it interesting, that's cool too_
Isn’t the point you’re making what OP is saying - that there are of course some humans who have deep intrinsic motivation, and they’ll continue to do what they do, but most humans aren’t wired this way, and for that, society will collapse?