alt Hacker NewsI'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent. It's great when you're at a total loss for ideas, but when you already have some of the pieces it ultimately wants to drive all of the thinking and takes over. Then it just feels like you're deferring your experienced judgement. I've seen colleagues lose the ability to reason any more without asking the agent to do it for them, because they inherently don't see the point if the agent is going to end up doing the whole piece (and probably auditing/overruling anything they came up with on their own).
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> I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent. It's great when you're at a total loss for ideas
I feel the opposite, like if I go to an agent without first knowing what I want to build, I'll never figure out what I'm doing or why and it'll run away from me.
I pretty much always go back and forth and have the agent write out a plan to a file and review it myself in my text editor. I still sometimes end up with surprises I disagree with, but I don't really find it to be true that the LLM ends up trying to "drive all of the thinking".
When I'm thinking through an architecture, I not only instruct it to refrain from writing any code, I don't even necessarily tell the agent what I'm trying to build.
> I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent.
I walk to work and home with ChatGPT Voice and AirPods. I ask it to be Socratic and I just start rambling the top of thing on my mind. After 20 mins of back-and-forth it's usually teased an answer out of me or I've teased an answer out of it.
This is one thing I actually do with a chatbot, instead of an agent. Voice mode even.
I start talking to it while doing menial tasks like cleaning or doing the laundry, and I discuss the architectual decisions and options until I come to some resemblance of a plan.
Good side of this approach is that I can't just "skim over" or "copy paste" things - either I understood them and can repeat them myself, or I can't. It takes more time than /grill-me and similar approaches, but it's the only approach that doesn't make me want to claw my brain out.
Sometimes it's easier for me to scaffold the architecture (in real, working code) and then let the agent fill in the implementation. And I make the agent document the architecture and have it refer to the documentation when coding. When I review agent code, I focus only on architecture (is it following existing architecture? is it introducing new structures, dependencies, etc.?)
Other times, I let the agent create a black box with a well-defined interface contract. I don't care about the architecture inside the black box.
How much scope do you give it? I find it's easier to stay in control when you give it scope down the chunks of work you give it.
Why would you care about architecture? It was an issue when humans were writing code so architecture mattered in the sense that you needed a sweet spot between current requirements and future extensions.
The agent can rewrite half your codebase in one day, so architecture stops mattering for the most part.
I have had really good experiences with designing architecture with agents. It is much much better than humans and frankly, if my colleagues had used agents to design their new services, we'd have been in much better place.
I have found autonomous agents to be pathetic at architectural decisions.
Architecture has remained so far to be one of those domains where skillset dwarfs everything by comparison.
Treat the final "here's what you should do" summary as just another intrusive thought.
I tend to find this part of the work enjoyable. It is just a faster and more productive version of what I would do with any engineer working for me who owns a large feature. I barely have to hint at my concern or drop the right keyword and the agent (Fable/Astra) will immediately understand.
"Couldn't this be stateless?" "Do you have a plan to be able to shard this?" - We will almost always pivot from the agents initial design but the agent is able to easily understand the reasons and benefits and align quickly.
If I was writing the code myself, I'd often have to make compromises between the ideal architecture and the level of effort required to implement it - now I can just always have the ideal architecture.