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Comment by zknill | Hacker News Reader

> "and which ones are no longer relevant."

This is absolutely the hardest bit.

I guess the short-cut is to include all the chat conversation history, and then if the history contains "do X" followed by "no actually do Y instead", then the LLM can figure that out. But isn't it fairly tricky for the agent harness to figure that out, to work out relevancy, and to work out what context to keep? Perhaps this is why the industry defaults to concatenating messages into a conversation stream?

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My guess (I will test this eventually) is that you set a window size (which may be the model limit, or lower to reduce input token costs), the harness then refuses to show items that don't fit. If the model emits a command to read a file, the harness then says "File hidden due to lack of context space". In the system prompt, the model is informed about the context space usage, and that it can hide files. It needs to be instructed that if files contain something noteworthy, that the agent notes this down in their notes, which should always be rendered into the context. If this fails, the agent will hide a file with relevant information and then get lost in circles. If it succeeds, the agent can work on larger tasks autonomously. So it's worth trying.

That's what the embedding model is for. It's like a tack-on LLM that works out the relevancy and context to grab.

God knows why you think this is possible. If I don't even know what might be relevant to the conversation in several turns, there's no way an agent could either.

One of us is confusing prediction with retrieval. The embedding model doesn't predict what is going to be relevant in several turns, just on the turn at hand. Each turn gets a fresh semantic search against the full body of memory/agent comms. If the conversation or prompt changes the next query surfaces different context automatically.

As you build up a "body of work" it gets better at handling massive, disparate tasks in my admittedly short experience. Been running this for two weeks. Trying to improve it.

So the embedding model is a fixed-size view on a arbitrarily sized work history (tool calls, natural language messages)? The model is like a summarizer, but in latent space? And not aimed to summarize, but trained to hold whatever is needed for the agent to be autonomous for longer runs?

Pretty much. It's a fixed-size vector per chunk-- 1024 dims in the case of Voyager Nano. The autonomy part is entirely in how you build the vectorDB and query it, not in the model's training. That's the part I've been focusing on lately. Trying different methods and seeing what gives the best results.

At the moment I wouldn't emphasize "autonomous-ness", there's still a fair bit of human hand holding. But once I get a model on the right path it can switch back to to an old project, autonomously locate and debug 2-week old commits and the context around their development, and apply that knowledge to the task at hand.

It's only been a day but I seeing an improvement from nomite (768dims) to Voayager.

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