The LLM's whole shtick is that it can read and comprehend our writing, so let's architect for it at that level.
My current thought is that (human) contributors should be encouraged to `ln -s CONTRIBUTING.md CLAUDE.local.md` or whatever in their local checkout for their agent of choice, have that .gitignored, and all contributors (human and LLM) will read and write to the same file.
The "new" thing would be putting CONTRIBUTING.md into subfolders as appropriate - which could often be quite useful for humans anyway.
A good example is autonomous driving and local laws / context. "No turn on red. School days 7am-9am".
So you need: where am I, when are school days for this specific school, and what datetime it is. You could attempt to gather that through search. Though more realistically I think the municipality will make the laws require less context, or some machine readable (e.g. qrcode) transfer of information will be on the sign. If they don't there's going to be a lot of rule breaking.
We've completely redesigned society around cars - making the most human populated environments largely worse for humans along the way.
Universal sidewalks (not really needed with slow moving traffic like horses and carts - though nice even back then), traffic lights, stop signs, street crossing, interchanges, etc.
If we end up where the video presents, humans don't deserve technology of any kind.
Not to be too harsh, but this sentiment -- that the successes of the ruling class are theirs to boast, but their failures are all humanity's shame -- is so pervasive and so effective at shielding rightful blame from said ruling class that I just cannot help but push back when I see it/
Slapping on a sign is ineffective
I’m saying this because it seemed silly to me to be dreaming up some weird system of QR codes or LLM readable speed limits instead of simply making the street follow best practices which change how humans drive for the better _today_.
This needs to contain things that you would never write for humans. They also do stupid things which need to be adjusted by these descriptions.
We may never achieve your future where context is unlimited, models are trained on your codebase specifically, and tokens are cheap enough to use all of this. We might have a bubble pop and in a few years we could all be paying 5-10X current prices (read: the actual cost) for similar functionality to today. In that reality, how many years of inferior agent behavior do you tolerate before you give up hoping that it will evolve past needing the tweaks?
This isn't guaranteed. Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars, we likely won't have fully human quality coders.
Right now AI coders are going to be another tool in the tool bucket.
If we're otherwise assuming it reads and follows an AGENTS.md file, then following the README.md should be within reach.
I think our task is to ensure that our README.md is suitable for any developer to onboard into the codebase. We can then measure our LLMs (and perhaps our own documentation) by if that guidance is followed.
By analogy, the first hands-off coding agents may be like that: they may not work for everything, but where they do, they could work without human intervention.
I find them more enjoyable than Uber. They’ve already surpassed Lyft in SF ridership and soon they will take the crown from Uber.
Yes, they do, the term to search is “remote assistance operator”. e.g. https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/all-robotaxis-have-remote...
The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled.
That’s… not very autonomous.
Furthermore 2 miles of autonomous driving is… autonomous. And over time that will become 3 then 4 then 5. Perhaps it never reaches infinite autonomy but an hour of autonomous driving is more than enough to get most people most places in a city and I’d bet you money that we’ll reach that point within a decade.
I didn't say that. But they're not fully autonomous.
We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.
This whole subthread started with the assertion:
Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars...
So we did start out by discussing whether current Waymo is fully autonomous or not. It then devolved into nit-picking, but that was where the conversation started.
FWIW I agree that Waymo is an amazing achievement that will only get better. I don't know (or care, frankly) if they will ever be fully autonomous. If I could, I'd buy one of those cars right now, and pay a subscription to cover the cost of the need for someone to help the car out when it needs it. But it's incorrect to say that they don't need human operators, when they clearly currently do.
“Never is a long time...and none of us lives to see its length.” Elizabeth Yates, A Place for Peter (Mountain Born, #3)
“Never is an awfully long time.” J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Analyze the repository and add a suitable agents.md
The core problem is that every conversation is like ground hog day. You always start from scratch. Agents.md is a stop gap solution for that problem. Chatgpt actually has some notional memory that works across conversations. But it's a bit flaky, slow, and limited. It doesn't really learn across conversations.
That btw. is a big missing piece on the path to AGIs. There are some imperfect workarounds but a lot of knowledge is lost in between conversations. And the trick of just growing the amount of context we give to our prompts doesn't seem like it's the solution.
It's an organizational challenge, requiring a top level overview and easy to find sub documentation - and clear directives to use them when the AI starts architecting on a fresh start.
Overall, it's a good sign when a project is understandable in small independent chunks that don't demand a programmer/llm take in more context than was referenced.
I think the sweet spot would be all agents agree on a MUST-READ reference syntax for inside comments & docs that through simple scanning forces the file into the context. eg
// See @{../docs/payment-flow.md} for the overall design.
Reading their prompt gives ideas on how you can improve yours.