alt Hacker NewsThis is such a poor idea. LLM Agents don't have taste (abstraction capabilities). They are kind of like water, they take the shape of the container they're in. They are so much powerful when you build your own framework they can work in.
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Bruce Lee was ages ahead of its time with the Water phrase.
That is not what the text is arguing for and it has many good ideas, dropping the abstractions but keeping the test harness is one of them. I've worked on many aspect of programming language implementation through the years and I would struggle with the abstractions of parser-generators and bytecode designed by committee like an enterprise Java developer struggles with the Hibernate ORM. Dunno what people are putting in their prompts but ask LLM to roofline and it will pursue that target like a bloodhound.
Abstractions are ultimately a tool for humans to manage complexity in a particular class of problem, and to reduce cognitive load. Good abstractions come from imaginative human brains with taste and lived experience. Abstractions are also mind constructs that often have analogies in the real world. Even at the level of the CPU circuitry, abstractions serve that role. An LLM can only spit out what was already invented by humans and stitch it together in a tasteless, erroneous manner.