5 ms·

> any time any agent confidently asserts something then it has to provide associated evidence And this is enforced by... another LLM? Seems like it would work

> any time any agent confidently asserts something then it has to provide associated evidence And this is enforced by... another LLM? Seems like it would work alright until something is asserted implicitly and not categorized as an assertion.

ricardobeat 3mo ago
It does happen. But this is why the “ralph loop” works: over dozens (or hundreds) of iterations, eventually every regression, implicit assumption, fake passing test, is noticed and fixed by another agent. The code slowly but continuously converges to a better state. I’m surprised myself, but haven’t seen it fall into chaos or degradation so far.
- evolve-maz 3mo ago
  I haven't seen a code base which hasn't fallen into degradation from that loop. From personal experience, any "correction" leads to an LLM writing more code, or stripping apart interfaces and mixing logic poorly, or adding some hidden control flow just to catch that edge case rather than the general case for that category of input.
  - lrizzo 3mo ago
    same as in real life?
    - evolve-maz 3mo ago
      I wouldn't accept that junk from any engineer in my team. My experience with good developers has been: - Create something a bit ugly which works - As more use cases come in, refactor code and clean up old gnarly bits LLMs tend to work architecture astronaut style mixed with a junior for implementation. Build theoretically good interfaces but then implement dependencies across all of them. And when changes happen, keep feeding that cycle.
AndrewThrowaway 3mo ago
But doesn't things like that happen with people? Take academy where some professor implicitly states "facts" or military or software development where some highly praised senior always has his last word...
- ben_w 3mo ago
  Sure, but it goes wrong with people, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

ricardobeat 3mo ago

It does happen. But this is why the “ralph loop” works: over dozens (or hundreds) of iterations, eventually every regression, implicit assumption, fake passing test, is noticed and fixed by another agent. The code slowly but continuously converges to a better state. I’m surprised myself, but haven’t seen it fall into chaos or degradation so far.

evolve-maz 3mo ago
I haven't seen a code base which hasn't fallen into degradation from that loop. From personal experience, any "correction" leads to an LLM writing more code, or stripping apart interfaces and mixing logic poorly, or adding some hidden control flow just to catch that edge case rather than the general case for that category of input.
- lrizzo 3mo ago
  same as in real life?
  - evolve-maz 3mo ago
    I wouldn't accept that junk from any engineer in my team. My experience with good developers has been: - Create something a bit ugly which works - As more use cases come in, refactor code and clean up old gnarly bits LLMs tend to work architecture astronaut style mixed with a junior for implementation. Build theoretically good interfaces but then implement dependencies across all of them. And when changes happen, keep feeding that cycle.

AndrewThrowaway 3mo ago

But doesn't things like that happen with people? Take academy where some professor implicitly states "facts" or military or software development where some highly praised senior always has his last word...

ben_w 3mo ago
Sure, but it goes wrong with people, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion