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Research-Driven Agents: When an agent reads before it codes
- hopechong 6mo agoCoding agents that read papers before writing code find optimizations that code-only agents miss. We added a literature review phase to Karpathy’s autoresearch loop and pointed it at llama.cpp. The agent autonomously read arxiv papers, studied competing forks and spun up VMs to run parallel experiments.
- dataviz1000 6mo agoSorry to spam, I'm working on this also from a different angle. Hopefully sharing adds to the conversation. First, about the loop, Claude's (coding agent) context and attention is big enough to self-reflect. Agent Tuning shows a technique that not only demonstrates this but a way quantify it. [0] The difference is autoresearch's val_bpb measures what the agent built; Agent Tuning's p̂ measures the agent itself. > Claude's attention doesn't distinguish between "instructions I'm writing" and "instructions I'm following" -- they're both just tokens in context. Second, doing research, finding academic research to add to context helps. Here is an example of an implementation that creates trading strategies by reading research and recreating them in creative new ways. [1] The biggest problem is the coding agents don't "Fail fast and loud". They fail deceivingly. [0] https://github.com/adam-s/agent-tuning https://github.com/adam-s/agent-tuning [1] https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic
- mkagenius 6mo ago> The biggest problem is the coding agents don't "Fail fast and loud". They fail deceivingly. GPT 2 and 3 used to fail fast (and loud coz we could easily see it lying)
- dataviz1000 6mo agoMy next exploration will be "Coding Agents: fail slow, silent, and deceivingly". After one month working on using Claude to create trading strategies, the one thing I learned; if the strategy looks like it can profit, it is a lie. The trading strategy agent doesn't find trading strategies that work, it is really a bug hunting agent.
- j_gonzalez 6mo ago[flagged]
- phendrenad2 6mo agoThis is obvious, right? If you want to build a Facebook clone, you wouldn't tell the agent "build Facebook". You would provide it with a description of every page on Facebook, behaviors, interactions, UI, etc.
- faeyanpiraat 6mo agoHave you even read the TL;DR in the linked article??
- phendrenad2 6mo agoYou mean this part? > TL;DR: Coding agents generate better optimizations when they read papers and study competing projects before touching code What made you think I hadn't read the article, let alone that TL;DR? I'm really curious. Jumping to an insulting "have you read the article" is a big step, so it'll be really interesting to see where your mind went.
- esafak 6mo agoAgreed. This is nothing but RAG, which helps when the task benefits from more knowledge. They're just going into the details of their application.
- KingOfCoders 6mo agoI use #PPPCDC for prompting: plan,plan,plan then verify with: Compare the plan to the existing Code. Reread and compare the plan to the Docs. Fix the areas you're not Confident about.
- hungryhobbit 6mo agoI think anyone who uses Claude knows that it works smarter when you have it make a plan first, and ask it to research the existing code as much as possible first ... so the results in this article doesn't surprise me at all. However, I'd be curious to hear back from others who have tried adding the shell script (at the end of the article) to their flow: does it (really) improve Claude?
- doctorpangloss 6mo agoThe skypilot devs need to focus on decoupling their offering, so that their very valuable "find the cheapest cloud" functionality isn't married to a glitchy reinvention of Kubernetes JobSet and MLflow
- Bmello11 6mo ago[dead]
- simlevesque 6mo agoI've been making skills from arxiv papers for a while. I have a one for multi-object tracking for example. It has a SKILL.md describing all important papers (over 30) on the subject and a folder with each paper's full content as reStructuredText. To feed Arxiv papers to LLMs I found that RST gives the best token count/fidelity ratio. Markdown lacks precision. LateX is too verbose. I have a script with the paper's urls, name and date that downloads the LateX zips from Arxiv, extracts it, transforms them to RST and then adds them to the right folder. Then I ask a LLM to make a summary from the full text, then I give other LLMs the full paper again with the summary and ask them to improve on and and proofread them. While this goes on I read the papers myself and at the end I read the summaries and if I approve them I add it to the skill. I also add for each paper info on how well the algorithms described do in common benchmarks. I highly recommend doing something similar if you're working in a cutting-edge domain. Also I'd like to know if anyone has recommendations to improve what I do.
- alex000kim 6mo agosounds similar to "LLM Knowledge Bases" https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595
- j_gonzalez 6mo ago[flagged]
- MrLeap 6mo agoWhat is RST?
- simlevesque 6mo agoreStructuredText: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- austinbaggio 6mo agoResearch step makes sense, can also confirm that running multiple agents with diverse strategies also compound results more quickly than single agents
- alex000kim 6mo agoI am sure this would works well in general. There is a challenge wrt to how to make them communicate effectively to e.g. 1) avoid duplicative work and 2) allow them to combine/overlay each others' findings to yield even better results
- outside1234 6mo agoA research step (gather insights from across the codebase and internet for how to accomplish the next step), planning step (how should I sequence implementation given that research), an implementation step, and a verification step (code review of the implementation) is super effective workflow for me.
- alex000kim 6mo agoyup, as the blog says > The full setup works with any project that has a benchmark and test suite. so having a clear and measurable verification step is key. Meaning you can't simply give an AI agent a vague goal e.g. "improve the quality of the codebase" because it's too general.
- Malachiidaniels 6mo ago[flagged]
- ctoth 6mo agoI've been very interested in this recently. I'm pretty sure that every project should have a ./papers directory of annotated papers in it like I do in Qlatt[0]. Literally every project. If it's something that's been done a million times then that means it has good literature on it? If not, then even more important to find related stuff! And not just crunchy CS stuff like databases or compilers or whatever. Are you creating a UI? There's probably been great UI research you can base off of! Will this game loop be fun in the game you're building? There's probably been research about it! [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/papers/ https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/papers/
- alex000kim 6mo agoThat directory is huge already! I guess the index.md helps the agent find what it needs, but even the markdown file is very long - this would consume a ton of tokens. Also I wonder who/what decides what papers go in there. In the blog post, the agent is allowed to do its own search.
- ctoth 6mo agoCheck out the Researcher and Process Leads skill in ctoth/research-papers-plugin. I have basically completely automated the literature review.
- pstuart 6mo agoHaving a "indexed global data collection" of the markdown would be a kumbaya moment for AI. There's so much data out there but finite disk space. Maybe torrents or IPFS could work for this?
- ctoth 6mo agoI'm actually sort of working on this! https://github.com/ctoth/propstore https://github.com/ctoth/propstore -- it's like Cyc, but there is no one answer. Plus knowledge bases are literally git repos that you can fork/merge. Research-papers-plugin is the frontend, we extract the knowledge, then we need somewhere to put it :)
- maCDzP 6mo agoI have a ML project. I usually set up a team of agents, where I have a leader, archivist, research assistant, researcher, developer and tester. The team generates hypothesis based on papers, test it, and iterate over that. Everything is documented using a lab notebook. It burns tokens but I have found some promising strategies that I am testing.
- kaycebasques 6mo agoGemini has a Deep Research API: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deep-research https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deep-research
- tomi_dev 6mo agoThis is interesting.Do you see a noticeable difference in output quality when the agent reads context first vs going straight into generation? Feels like most tools skip that step.
- tomi_dev 6mo agoThis is interesting. Do you see a noticeable difference in output quality when the agent reads context first vs going straight into generation? Feels like most tools skip that step.
- jbergqvist 6mo agoWhen I want to solve a new problem with an agent, I always ask it to search broadly for prior work in the given area online, and then analyze if we can build our solution using it as inspiration. I see it as the solution being out there in “idea space”, and by having the agent search beforehand we can more efficiently explore this space before converging on the final solution.
- dalmo3 6mo agoIs it not safe to assume that all* publicly available prior work is in the training data? Then you could just prompt it to propose options with pros and cons etc. * Bar extremely new stuff from after the cutoff
- technotony 6mo agoMaybe but having it search first to load the context with relevant information sure gets better results
- SadErn 6mo ago[dead]
- formerly_proven 6mo agoIncluded in the training corpus doesn’t mean perfect or even partial recall.
- sschlegel 6mo ago[dead]
- prats226 6mo agoA good experiment would be to also try giving it access to latency traces so it can identify issues? Wrt coding agents, giving access to observability tools often improve coding/debugging ability for me
- _enjn 6mo ago[dead]
- matthias_m_dev 6mo ago[dead]
- KaiShips 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- j_gonzalez 6mo ago[flagged]
- notef 6mo ago[dead]
- lmeyerov 6mo agoI've found value in architectural research before r&d tier projects like big changes to gfql, our oss gpu cypher implementation. It ends up multistage: - deep research for papers, projects etc. I prefer ChatGPT Pro Deep Research here As it can quickly survey hundreds of sources for overall relevance - deep dives into specific papers and projects, where an AI coding agent downloads relevant papers and projects for local analysis loops, performs technical breakdowns into essentially a markdown wiki, and then reduces over all of them into a findings report. Claude code is a bit nicer here because it supports parallel subagents well. - iterative design phase where the agent iterates between the papers repos and our own project to refine suggestions and ideas Fundamentally, this is both exciting, but also limiting: It's an example of 'Software Collapse' where we get to ensure best practices and good ideas from relevant communities, but the LLM is not doing the creativity here, just mashing up and helping pick. Tools to automate the stuff seems nice. I'd expect it to be trained into the agents soon as it's not far from their existing capabilities already. Eg, 'iteratively optimize function foobar, prefer GPU literature for how.'
- love2read 6mo agoIt sounds very silly but it sounds like they need to add a phase before research that finds a profiler and runs it before just guessing what optimizations may be beneficiary.
- Sim-In-Silico 6mo ago[dead]
- throwdbaaway 6mo agoVery nice TG improvement from Flash Attention KQ fusion. Is it something that was already done in ik_llama.cpp? If not, then it will be a welcomed addition for hybrid CPU/GPU inference.
- throwdbaaway 6mo ago> EC2 instances on shared hardware showed up to 30% variance between runs due to noisy neighbors. Based on this finding, I suppose the better way is to rely on local hardware whenever possible?
- neuzhou 6mo ago[dead]
- Leon8090 6mo ago[dead]
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- spotlayn 6mo ago[dead]
- claud_ia 6mo ago[dead]
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- mechoblast 6mo agoThis seems analagous to why Vercel found an AGENTS.md better than "skills", when in reality the agents.md is just the already expanded skill. This fits into the paradigm of finding ways to force better context engineering.
- tuo-lei 6mo ago[dead]
- a7om_com 6mo ago[dead]
- abhinaystha 6mo agothis one is interesting cause i have been struggling with deep research.
- CloakHQ 6mo ago[dead]