Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlieflowers | Hacker News Reader

> "any sufficiently advanced agent is indistinguishable from a DSL."

I don't quite follow but I'd love to hear more about that.

If you give an agent a task, the typical agentic pattern is that it calls tools in some non-deterministic loop, feeding the tool output back into the LLM, until it deems the task complete. The LLM internalizes an algorithm.

Another way of doing it is the agent just writes an algorithm to perform the task and runs it. In this world, tools are just APIs and the agent has to think through its entire process end to end before it even begins and account for all cases.

Only latter is turing complete, but the former approaches the latter as it improves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

No i get the clarke reference. But how is an agent a dsl?

Maybe not an agent exactly but I can see an agentic application is kind of like a dsl because the user space has a set of queries and commands they want to direct the computer to take action but they will describe those queries and commands in English and not with normal programming function calls

My read was roughly that agents require constraining scaffolding (CLAUDE.md) and careful phrasing (prompt engineering) which together is vaguely like working in a DSL?

If the llm is able to code it, there is enough training data that youight be better off in a different language that removes the boilerplate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com