Agent Psychosis

I read this fascinating post by Armin Ronacher on the perils of using agents. This is something that hardly anyone bats an eyelid to - the rationale is if something is messy, I’ll throw it out and write it again.

We are going to enter weird times where we’ll have an army of new engineers who are likely to know how to prompt but not really how to think. Some senior engineers might end up here too.

The best thing one can do is to be active and vigilant and actually bring some thought into building things. Define design choices and ask the LLM to adhere to it. It’ll likely not do it from time to time and one should steer the model to do the right thing.

Else, we’ll all be drowning in slop soon.