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Comment by bwfan123 | Hacker News Reader

> Agents need to handle recurring tasks reliably and effectively

This core problem remains unsolved. The solution presented in the article with Human In The Loop and some skill-magic such as "Write principles, not rules etc." is unsatisfactory because it offers no guarantees whatsoever. I find it difficult to harness agents into deterministic workflows which need to produce reliable outcomes.

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Agents aren’t made for deterministic workflows. Note that the recommendations for determinism are things like adding scripts to hooks.

Where an LLM with “run lint every time a subagent completes their task” might do it 99% of the time, a hook tied to the worker ending will run 100% of the time.

Genuinely not trying to be pedantic but deterministic workflows are not what agents do. Indeed they're not capable of them.

You want workflows where the human gates are properly placed, not a "software factory" that you never place eyes on.

That’s sort of, in my opinion, the power of agents that can assist in developing software. The parts that are deterministic are best baked into existing programming paradigms. In some cases it’s good to take the nondeterministic parts we tried to bake into programming languages (often using generic probabilistic means) to outsourcing back to agents. Sometimes even then if the nondeterministic part is well understood and probabilistic methods work (lots of modeling lands here) then leave that in programming paradigms as well.

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