3 ms·

Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common. Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how t

Agents and I apparently have a whole lot in common. Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues. This only gets worse when the LLM captures all that information better than certain human colleagues somehow, rewarding the additional effort.

dgunay 7mo ago
Right? It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along, because it turns out humans function better too when given the proper context for their work. The only silver lining is that this is a colossal karmic retribution for the orgs that never gave a shit about this stuff until LLMs.
- thunky 7mo ago
  > It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along There's a good reason why we didn't though: because we didn't see any obvious value in it. So it felt like a waste of time. Now it feels like time well spent.
- AbstractH24 7mo ago
  You are seeing very similar trends in GTM suddenly everyone cares about data hygiene. But it’s not like this shouldn’t have always been a priority
saghm 7mo ago
> Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues. "Self-descriptive code doesn't need comments!" always gets an eye-roll from me
fwipsy 7mo ago
Helping the AI is helping themselves. You're doing your job, the AI is helping with their job.

dgunay 7mo ago

Right? It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along, because it turns out humans function better too when given the proper context for their work. The only silver lining is that this is a colossal karmic retribution for the orgs that never gave a shit about this stuff until LLMs.

thunky 7mo ago
> It's infuriating. Nearly all of the agentic coding best practices are things that we should have just been doing all along There's a good reason why we didn't though: because we didn't see any obvious value in it. So it felt like a waste of time. Now it feels like time well spent.
AbstractH24 7mo ago
You are seeing very similar trends in GTM suddenly everyone cares about data hygiene. But it’s not like this shouldn’t have always been a priority

saghm 7mo ago

> Only being half ironic with this. I generally find that people somehow magically manage to understand how to be materially helpful when the subject is a helpless LLM. Instead of pointing it to a random KB page, they give it context. They then shorten that context. They then interleave context as comments. They provide relevant details. They go out of their way to collect relevant details. Things they somehow don't do for their actual colleagues. "Self-descriptive code doesn't need comments!" always gets an eye-roll from me

fwipsy 7mo ago

Helping the AI is helping themselves. You're doing your job, the AI is helping with their job.