MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What am I doing wrong Re Agentic coding
by tlonny | 2025-09-22 19:56:21+00:00
Here is the prompt I gave both Claude Code CLI, and the VSCode agent for my TS project:

```

I have modified the type signature and behaviour of how jobs are created. Previously, job definition create took a batch argument (created from a queue). Now it takes the queue directly, is async, requires the databaseClient to be passed in at creation (vs. when the batch is executed). It no longer returns anything - which is fine because the result was only being used for logging - which is now done for us so we don't have to worry. Can we refactor the codebase to make use of the new JobDefinition.create? Remove the vestigial "Job created" log please.

Perform this task and this task only. If you see something unrelated that you believe needs to be refactored - DO NOT MODIFY IT. ONLY PERFORM ACTIONS DIRECTLY RELEVANT TO THIS TASK

```

So there are two instructions:

1. Do the task

2. Don't do stuff that isn't the task (added in frustration on subsequent attempts)

My experience:

The agent flow started well - it found all the files that needed to change and began making edits.

By about file #5 I noticed that on top of requested refactor it started re-ordering object keys of the `JobDefinition.create` method. Although semantically a no-op, this was incredibly frustrating as it made diffs much harder to review.

A little later, it started to modify log messages it wasn't happy with before eventually completely going off the rails and adding arguments to my function definitions that it _thought_ they needed (introducing type/run-time errors).

VSCode would periodically pause and ask for a confirmation in order to continue. Each time I used the opportunity to re-prompt the agent to stay on target:

Me: "STOP GOING OFF TASK - STOP RENAMING VARIABLES, REORDERING PARAMS. JUST DO AS THE TASK TELLS YOU AND NOTHING ELSE"

Agent: "You're absolutely right. I apologize for going off task. Let me focus solely on the task: refactoring JobDefinition.create calls to use the new signature and removing vestigial "Job created" logs"

And each time the bad behavior would return after some time.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I assumed this sort of mechanical monkey work would be bread and butter for an agentic workflow - but it just keeps losing coherence.

I ended up reverting all the changes as I had absolutely 0 trust in the quality of the generated code.

I apologise for the wall of text but I'm quite frustrated about all the time wasted and am desperate to know what I'm doing wrong!

Thanks in advance!
by maxenglander | 2025-09-22 19:56:39+00:00
In addition to the point about performance Sam made, PlanetScale's Vitess (MySQL) offers out-of-the-box horizontal scalability, which means we can maintain extremely good performance as your dataset and QPS grows to a massive scale: https://planetscale.com/case-studies/cash-app. We will be bringing the same capability to Postgres later on.

Our uptime and reliability is also higher than what you might find elsewhere. It's not uncommon for companies paying lots of money to operate elsewhere to migrate to PlanetScale for that reason.

We're a serious database for serious businesses. If a business can't afford to spend $39/mo to try PlanetScale, they may be happier operating elsewhere until their business grows to a point where they are running into scaling and performance limits and can afford (or badly need, depending on the severity of those limits) to try us out.
by uncletaco | 2025-09-22 19:56:48+00:00
Family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Knoxville, family goes to a non-denominational evangelical church in Amarillo. Both would probably be the same denomination but its unpopular to claim a denomination these days. After church its dinner that's a meat + 2 vegetables and cornbread. There's a big ford in each driveway that hasn't hauled more than dogs and kids since the day it came home. Maybe its just my biases but I just did not have any culture shock outside of how long it takes to drive anywhere out west.
by nmitchko | 2025-09-22 19:57:09+00:00
Next steps for AI in general:

- additional modalities - Faster FPS (inferences per second) - Reaction time tuning (latency vs quality tradeoff) for visual and audio inputs/outputs - built-in planning modules in the architecture (think premotor frontal lobe) - time awareness during inference (towards an always inferring / always learning architecture)
by kentonv | 2025-09-22 19:57:12+00:00
> So it's basically Stubby/gRPC.

Stubby / gRPC do not support object capabilities, though. I know that's not what you meant but I have to call it out because this is a huuuuuuuge difference between Cap'n Proto/Web vs. Stubby/gRPC.

> a ton of responsibility on the user/dev —i.e. the same amount that prompted protobuf to exist, afterall.

In practice, people should use TypeScript to specify their Cap'n Web APIs. For people working in TypeScript to start with, this is much nicer than having to learn a separate schema format. And the protocol evolution / compatibility problem becomes the same as evolving a JavaScript library API with source compatibility, which is well-understood.

> a missied implicit compression opportunity? IDK to what extent this actually happens on the fly or not.

Don't get me wrong, I love binary protocols for their efficiency.

But there are a bunch of benefits to just using JSON under the hood, especially in a browser.

Note that WebSocket in most browsers will automatically negotiate compression, where the compression context is preserved over the whole connection (not just one message at a time), so if you are sending the same property names a lot, they will be compressed out.
by rubiest2010 | 2025-09-22 19:57:28+00:00
This is a reasonable perspective but leaves a lot of unanswered questions and creates more questions. Who is the funder threatening to pull funding and why were they not more collaborative or flexible with Ruby Central? Did they know that this is how their request would be handled?

How much information and what information did Board members have when making their votes?

One thing that hasn’t been addressed is who was responsible for communications and implementation of this. It says here that the Director of Open Source did what the Board asked of him. Outside of the Board, which as stated here were heads down and trying to problem solve, Ruby Central’s website also shows a staff of several non-technical employees. Prominently, there is an Executive Director with a background in communications and non profit work per their LinkedIn. Where was this Executive Director and the other staff members during this? Were they involved with decision making and communication around this? How involved was the Board of Directors in implementation after the decision was made? It is a hollow statement to say they are just technical people trying to problem solve when there appears to be a whole team of non-technical staff members and an executive specializing in communications. Something clearly went wrong here and there are a lot of missing pieces around what happened after the vote took place. Most of this could have been mitigated with standard processes and simply communicating to maintainers and the community.
by bediger4000 | 2025-09-22 19:57:33+00:00
RFKJ promised to reveal a cause of autism in September. He's trying to hit his mark. As far as motivating a bogus assertion, I think that the point is to blame people for having autistic children. Oh, your boy is on the spectrum? It's your fault for taking Tylenol. Hide that hideous monster away, you moral weaklings!

Also insurance will be able to quibble over paying for any treatments. Parents will avoid a diagnosis by any means possible, and work hard in secret to make sure children don't display any telltale signs. Schools won't have to do anything to accommodate the mutant Spawn of immoral failures. It's a win all around!
by smokel | 2025-09-22 19:58:02+00:00
I fail to understand why we would lack data. Sure, there is limited (historical) text, but if we just open up all available video, and send out interactive robots into the world, we'll drown in data. Then there is simulated data, and tons of sensors that can capture vast amounts of even more data.

Edit: from the source [1], this quote pretty much sums it all up: "Our 2022 paper predicted that high-quality text data would be fully used by 2024, whereas our new results indicate that might not happen until 2028."

[1] https://epoch.ai/blog/will-we-run-out-of-data-limits-of-llm-...
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-22 19:58:12+00:00
Yeah, it's hard to fault people from wanting to find as many technical solutions as possible to reduce social problems to a minimum. I can fault CRDTs for thinking that they could solve all of them technically, enough so that they put "conflict-free" in the name, because yeah, there are always problems you can't solve technically, there is always user knowledge you can't just assume the technically best approach is the semantically, socially, or even politically best approach (again as much as we might want to wish that we could solve these things technically, which is a beautiful dream sometimes).
by simonw | 2025-09-22 19:58:33+00:00
You can try it out on https://chat.qwen.ai/ - sign in with Google or GitHub (signed out users can't use the voice mode) and then click on the voice icon.

It has an entertaining selection of different voices, including:

*Dylan* - A teenager who grew up in Beijing's hutongs

*Peter* - Tianjin crosstalk, professionally supporting others

*Cherry* - A sunny, positive, friendly, and natural young lady

*Ethan* - A sunny, warm, energetic, and vigorous boy

*Eric* - A Sichuan Chengdu man who stands out from the crowd

*Jada* - The fiery older sister from Shanghai
by analognoise | 2025-09-22 19:59:21+00:00
I mean is this kind of thing really convincing?

The side that thinks vaccines are a hoax, RFK Jr discovered the cause of autism, wants to burn up satellites we’ve already paid for because the carbon numbers are bad, suggested injecting bleach (remember that?), stared at the solar eclipse, constantly makes noise about how women should have fewer rights and maybe the 10 commandments belong in school… are not who you want in charge of science funding. Obviously.

Remember the sharpie path of the hurricane? No need for a supercomputer, we’ve got sharpie.

Team “windmills cause cancer” obviously isn’t better for science, get real.
by nvdnadj92 | 2025-09-22 19:59:27+00:00
I'm working on the same project myself and was planning to write a blog post similar to the author's. However, I'll share some additional tips and tricks that really made a difference for me.

For preprocessing, I found it best to convert files to a 16kHz WAV format for optimal processing. I also add low-pass and high-pass filters to remove non-speech sounds. To avoid hallucinations, I run Silero VAD on the entire audio file to find timestamps where there's a speaker. A side note on this: Silero requires careful tuning to prevent audio segments from being chopped up and clipped. I also use a post-processing step to merge adjacent VAD chunks, which helps ensure cohesive Whisper recordings.

For the Whisper task, I run Whisper in small audio chunks that correspond to the VAD timestamps. Otherwise, it will hallucinate during silences and regurgitate the passed-in prompt. If you're on a Mac, use the whisper-mlx models from Hugging Face to speed up transcription. I ran a performance benchmark, and it made a 22x difference to use a model designed for the Apple Neural Engine.

For post-processing, I've found that running the generated SRT files through ChatGPT to identify and remove hallucination chunks has a better yield.
by rolph | 2025-09-22 19:59:30+00:00
agents assemble acording to "rule based pairing" such as chemistry.

these assemblages interact according to rule pairing.

these "rules" are naturaly emergent physical constraints on the spectrum of equilibrially driven interactions. add some thermokinetic motion, and you have a multi agent system, expressing rules between each other, cyclicly.

this results in a persistent central tendency of physical outcome based on rule pairing.

this is more like geometric progression, than computation.
by stockresearcher | 2025-09-22 19:59:32+00:00
King George’s royal proclamation of 1763 established the “Indian Reserve” covering most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. European colonists were prohibited from trespassing - only a small number of British military outposts were allowed. Just a short time before the revolution, it got organized as part of Quebec.

Early in the revolution, it was taken by the colonists who declared it “Illinois County, Virginia” and allowed people to stream in and claim their homesteads (Note that the northern part was claimed by Connecticut as their own “Western Reserve”). Essentially all of southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois was settled by people crossing the river from Kentucky, so it makes a lot of sense that you’d think that the southern parts of all these states seem more similar to each other than they are to their northern neighbors.

The next section north seems to have been mostly dominated by folks from the mid-Atlantic - Virginia, etc. And further north dominated by people that arrived on sailing ships, especially from New York. New Buffalo Michigan refers to Buffalo New York ;)

Anyway, it seems kind of weird that these states seem geographically oriented north-south but culturally oriented east-west. But the fact that they were depopulated (of Europeans) and then repopulated (by Europeans) gives an explanation of that, especially with the transportation available at the time of repopulation (of Europeans).
by bluecalm | 2025-09-22 19:59:42+00:00
Why should that obligation be proportional (or progressively proportional) to the wealth you have and not to the resources you use (or wealth you have in that country). Why someone who made millions in Poland (and paid taxed there) should pay 20x for living the same life in say Spain as a typical resident there?

It's so easy to say "moral" but I struggle to see the moral principle at play. I understand paying proportionally to resources/wealth in that country. I understand paying progressively for those or income in that country but why pay in proportion to what you have already build in another place?
by TheAlchemist | 2025-09-22 19:59:46+00:00
Folks old enough to have been around in 2000 have seen this movie before.

If this was such a great business, money would be coming from outside and Nvidia would be using its profits to scale production. But they know it's not and once the bubble pops, they profit margin evaporates in months. So they keep the ball rolling - this is pretty much equivalent to buying the cards from ... themselves.
by hluska | 2025-09-22 19:59:47+00:00
> reading between the lines, it sounds like companies want Ruby Central to operate more like a for-profit company, where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid, than like a jury or the American Medical Association, where people do what seems best to them in exchange for a harder-to-define sense of collective social obligation.

There was a funding agreement which imposed obligations upon the operators. Those obligations were to be sure that supply chain attacks were reasonably secured against. The volunteers didn’t have to sign that agreement - they chose to and received consideration for their decision to sign.

Licensing terms don’t change the underlying mechanism of a contract and the message is even easier. If your organization cannot abide by the terms of a contract, don’t sign it.
by technothrasher | 2025-09-22 20:00:06+00:00
I adored these books when I was a kid, and a few of us friends re-invented them in college in the 1990's as email chains. You'd write a few introductory paragraphs and a choice, and then email it to a few friends. You'd then end up writing multiple paths as you went, depending upon what your friends chose. The first one I wrote started as just a scruffy little dog who escaped his backyard. He ended up going on all kinds of wild alternate adventures, and did, unfortunately, end up dying quite a few times.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-22 20:00:31+00:00
As a millennial who graduated into the Great Recession job market and, in the span of 2007-2011 cited in the article, went from datacenter worker to delivering pizzas to government contract to 15 months unemployment, the scarring effect is absolutely real and still hinders my potential today.

Knowing younger folks are going through similar shit again incenses me. Two entire generations of young workers effectively f*ked out of early career and wage growth due to bad policies, lax regulations, and strong shareholder incentives compared to other economies, yet people are still balking at the prospect of anything other than further weakening of the status quo to enrich the old and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the poor.

Reprehensible. Those in power are failing the youth of today and tomorrow by engaging in petty squabbling and naked partisanship instead of practicing good governance. What we need are worker protections that prevent layoffs from profitable firms, regulations that promote job growth instead of shareholder value, wages that grow the middle class from the bottom up instead of top-down, job programs and guarantees for the unemployed, and immigration policies that promote domestic hiring first and naturalization instead of precarity for foreign experts brought in to private enterprises.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-22 20:00:52+00:00
In ninth grade in the town I grew up in, there were two junior high schools that traded off computers each semester. With a "newsletter" including printed programs.

The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".

With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.

In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.

My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.
by iamacyborg | 2025-09-22 20:01:11+00:00
> If you have say 4 million USD and invest in stocks expecting say 7% per year you will pay 103k USD in cap gain tax and then 44k in wealth tax for a grand total of almost 150k/year.

That’s only on realised gains, surely?

And if that’s the case, it’s likely cheaper than having worked for that income.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-22 20:01:19+00:00
To me, every time I've touched MySQL, I've found an issue that just rubbed me the wrong way... starting with the fact that UTF8 isn't, and even across new major versions hasn't changed to an alias for the real UTF8. (VAR)BINARY does case sensitive collation based on db default, it shouldn't do any type of textual comparison even if the data is "text". You can't do foreign keys with ANSI quotes for the table/field names...

Note: some of this may have changed in the past 6+ years I've avoided looking at it again.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-22 20:02:03+00:00
You can't get the trademark on the parts that are in common use, and you can't the trademark in a way that harms language. You can get protection over stuff that you invented and doesn't limit how people talk to each other.

On this case specifically, you can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon in a way that looks like it came from Disney. That's all that the trademark protects.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-09-22 20:02:14+00:00
You must have been asleep for the last 10+ years when leftist cancel culture was all the rage. Should I remind you how LEFT reacted to deplatforming Trump, Parler, Gab, firing of Carlsen? Everyone of note cheered for it and celebrated.

Now, when they are getting some slight taste of their own medicine and act very very upset: they can't to that to us!!!
by hadlock | 2025-09-22 20:02:20+00:00
Speech input + speech output is a big deal. In theory you can talk to it using voice, and it can respond in your language, or translate for someone else, without intermediary technologies. Right now you need wakeword, speech to text, and then text to speech, in addition to your core LLM. A couple can input speech, or output speech, but not both. It looks like they have at least 3 variants in the ~32b range.

Depending on the architecture this is something you could feasibly have in your house in a couple of years or in an expensive "ai toaster"
by growthwtf | 2025-09-22 20:02:28+00:00
Lattner's comment aside (which I'm fanboying a little bit at), I do tend to agree with your pessimism/realism for what it's worth. It's gonna be a long long time before that whole mess you're describing is sorted out, but I'm confident that over the next decade we will do it. There's just too much money to be made by fixing it at this point.

I don't think it's gonna happen instantly, but it will happen, and Mojo/Modular are really the only language platform I see taking a coherent approach to it right now.
by dekhn | 2025-09-22 20:03:02+00:00
Another issue some SGI (O2) had: they didn't clear the entire video/memory buffer between logins. So, occasionally, when you logged in on the console, you'd see random images from the previous user on the screen. Apparently the user before me was frequently surfing porn :(. After that the group lead updated the MOTD to explicitly say that was not allowed.
by marklubi | 2025-09-22 20:04:13+00:00
I wish. It's on Github, but my hands are tied and I can't share them since it's someone else's property now (hooray for exits, I think).

It's mostly a thought process...

I have or need something (entity), lets get data about it (repository/extensions), we need to do something with this now (only extensions).

Lots of "static" and "this" involved, but the separation and eventual simplicity makes it worth the effort.

Edit: I tried going through some of them to anonymize some for examples, but it felt like treading in dangerous territory.
by x0x0 | 2025-09-22 20:04:29+00:00
How you can tell this is all lies from the board is simple:

> How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them?

The first thing is they didn't tell them. The second bit is simple:

"Hi [x], I'm sure you've seen the news about npm. Given supply chain attacks directed at them and the one recently foiled against the python folks, we're [doing fill in here], including reducing permissions. [More info here.] Further updates as soon as we have them."

That email takes 10 minutes to write and send.
by catlover76 | 2025-09-22 20:04:35+00:00
> I take issue with, in parts of it he has an elitist, typical Yankee patronizing tone against the South, but overall it’s well done work

I'm not sure why anyone should expect the South to escape criticism for defining itself on racialized chattel slavery; fighting a war largely to preserve that system; having Jim Crow, lynching, etc.; continuing into the modern day to wish to rename things in favor of treasonous Confederates; being literal economic deadweight that benefits from an influx of tax dollars from Blue states (Yankee states, and "Left Coast", in this nations model) via the Federal government, even while voting against "s0cIALism" and constantly denigrating Yankee and Left Coast cities and states.