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Beyang Liu: evaluation

14 Dec 2023 Latent Space The "Normsky" architecture for AI coding agents — with Beyang Liu + Steve Yegge of SourceGraph

“Like, it definitely moves the needle a lot, but we're not quite there yet to the point where you can just fire and forget. And I actually think that this is something that people don't broadly appreciate yet, because I think that, like, everyone's chasing this dream of agentic execution.”

— Beyang Liu

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Beyang Liu
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
14 Dec 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…change. And the reason for that is, I think, the challenge that we ran into with inline fixes, and we do want to get to the point where you could just fire and forget and have, you know, half a dozen of these running in parallel. But I think we ran into the challenge early on that a lot of people are running into now when they're trying to construct agents, which is the reliability of, you know, working code generation is just not quite there yet in today's language models. And so that kind of constrains you to an interaction where the human is always, like, in the inner loop, like, checking the output of each response. And if you want that to work in a way where you can be asynchronous, you kind of have to constrain it to a domain where today's language models can generate reliable code well enough. So, you know, generating unit tests, that's, like, a well-constrained problem. Or fixing a bug that shows up as, like, a compiler error or a test error, that's a well-constrained problem. But the more general, like, hey, write me this class that does X, Y, and Z using the libraries that I have, that is not quite there yet, even with the benefit of really good context. Like, it definitely moves the needle a lot, but we're not quite there yet to the point where you can just fire and forget. And I actually think that this is something that people don't broadly appreciate yet, because I think that, like, everyone's chasing this dream of agentic execution. And if we're to really define that down, I think it implies a couple things. You have, like, a multi-step process where each step is fully automated. We don't have to have a human in the loop every time. And there's also kind of like an LM call at each stage or nearly every stage in that chain.…

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