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Comment by paool | Hacker News Reader

> shouldn't it just take advantage of what's already there?

It's not a good idea to have any coding agent put unnecessary amounts of lines into the context window in order to understand your code base.

Performance of all llms drop drastically when the context window is filled or full. The purpose of being more specific with your prompts is that you spend a little bit more tokens up front to make the task a lot more efficient and more likely to result in success.

At least that's how it is today. We're probably a breakthrough or two away from the type of vibe coding experience non-coders want. Or it may never happen, and the developers who have coding knowledge will be the only ones to fully utilize coding agents and it will only become more powerful over time.

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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the vibe coding experience non-coders want, but if it's one-shotting a buildable codebase off of an unspecific prompt, the major breakthrough would have to be brain-computer interfaces so the agent can literally read the user's mind.

If that same person approached a software development company with the same prompt without following up with any other details, they won't get good code back, either. You're not saying it, but this idea that in the future you can tell a computer something like "create photoshop" and get what your expecting is an unrealistic dream that would need mind-reading or a major breakthrough and paradigm shift in understanding and interpreting language.

> the major breakthrough would have to be brain-computer interfaces so the agent can literally read the user's mind.

And even that would not be enough.

In reality, it would have to put the user to sleep and go through various dream scenarios to have the user's brain really build an internal model that is not there in the first place. No brain interface can help find what is not there.

We usually need interactions with reality to build the internal model of what we actually want step by step, especially for things we have not done before.

Even for info that is there, that's also a limit to fantasy or sci-fi brain scanning. The knowledge is not stored like in a RAM chip, even when it is there. You would have to simulate the brain to actually go through the relevant experiences to extract the information. Predicting the actual dynamic behavior of the brain would require some super-super sub-molecular level scan and then correctly simulating that, since what the neurons will actually do depends on much more than the basic wiring. Aaaaand you may get a different result depending on time of day, how well they slept, mood and when and what the person ate and what news they recently read, etc. :)

That is also not enough. An agent could build an application that functions, but you also need to have a well-designed underlying architecture if you want the application to be extensible and maintainable - something the original dreamer may not even be capable of - so perhaps a shared extended dream share with a Sr. architect is also needed. Oh wait .. I guess we're back to square 1 again? lol

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