Hacker News Reader

Comment by vFunct | Hacker News Reader

> We're in a transition phase today where agents need special guidance to understand a codebase that go beyond what humans need. Before long, I don't think they will.

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.

View on HN

I don't think the bar here is a human level coder, I think the bar is an LLM which reads and follows the README.md.

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.

Have you taken a Waymo?

The limited self-driving cars, with a remote human operator? no, I never have.

This is a rather dismissive response considering the progress they’ve made over the past few years. The other commenter is correct that they use highly detailed maps but you are incorrect as they do not have a remote human operator.

I find them more enjoyable than Uber. They’ve already surpassed Lyft in SF ridership and soon they will take the crown from Uber.

you are incorrect as they do not have a remote human operator

Yes, they do, the term to search is “remote assistance operator”. e.g. https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/all-robotaxis-have-remote...

That’s phone a friend not someone remotely driving the car

They literally drive the car.

From what I’ve read they give it context to troubleshoot. They aren’t piloting it.

That’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example:

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.

It’s not irrelevant because those are fundamentally different modes of operating / troubleshooting. You say they have someone drive it. I say they don’t. We aren’t arguing about pure autonomy, we are arguing about the method by which humans resolve the problems.

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.

You say they have someone drive it.

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.

This rather underplays the experience of riding a Waymo. Where it works, it works: you get in and it takes you to the place, no human intervention required at any point.

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.

"where it works, it works" by that metric we already have agents which don't need any guidance to program

I'd say they're closer to 2010s self-driving cars; they still need frequent human intervention, even when on the happy path, to make sure they don't make a mess of things.

Waymo uses a bespoke 3D data representation of the SF roads, does it not? The self-driving car equivalent of an AGENTS.md file.

> Just like we will never have fully self-driving cars, we likely won't have fully human quality coders.

“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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com