Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

It seems there are two distinct groups, one which is doing relatively well with Luna, Deepseek Flash and similar models while other seem to be satisfied only with the state of the art.

View on HN

Depends on how in-the-loop you want to be. I personally delegate all the writing of the code to agents, but I maintain a clear mental model of the architecture, which I come up with by iterating and prototyping with agents. I can use Luna for all of this, although I switch depending on the task. It's nice to be able to throw a 1,000 word rough spec at Fable and get a personal tool that works perfectly though. I expect that as the models get better, I'll continue to be in the loop, but operate at increasingly higher levels of abstraction.

Having worked with both, it seems like a control thing to me. Either you're cool with Fable spitting out tons of code you'll never read, or you're cool with Luna doing targeted work while you manage the main work thread.

(I'm in the second boat so long as I'm responsible for the code I PR)

I'm ok with not-Fable until I need anything design-related: a nice HTML page, LaTeX typesetting, UI design. Sol is especially incapable of doing anything sensible.

Is there any alternative model with design sensibilities?

Did you add some skill for this? I've been using a frontend design skill with Sol and it's reasonable (for my purposes). I don't remember where I got that skill.md though, it probably was from OAI's own blog about this a few months ago.

Kimi K3 is amazing

fable is good at it but I find it uses the same slop in different variants every time. Even the words it uses for the different alternatives it proposes are the same (cartography, atlas, bench, signal, etc). At least you develop a good nose for slop ;) it becomes a struggle to steer it off the same path every time.

GP kinda explains why: "You have to lead it by the nose".

If you're happy to "lead it by the nose" you can do well with a lot of very low end models.

If you want to kick off a "/goal run until [complex verification passes]" and let it run for a week with minimal intervention, then not so much.

You can make do with cheaper models for long running agentic runs too, but it tends to require a lot of extra scaffolding and additional review steps.

I'm happily in both depending on what it is. Even Sol / Fable cannot do some truly novel stuff and if you rely on it too heavily you get detached from the underlying systems to the point that it's both uncomfortable and detrimental.

Yeah, it's about, do you guide it, or does it guide you.

People who know what they want and know how to describe what they want with sufficient detail, and everyone else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com