I'm personally 100% convinced of the opposite, that it's a waste of time to steer them. we know now that agentic loops can converge given the proper framing and self-reflectiveness tools.
replyConverge towards what though... I think the level of testing/verification you need to have an LLM output a non-trivial feature (e.g. Paxos/anything with concurrency, business logic that isn't just "fetch value from spreadsheet, add to another number and save to the database") is pretty high.
replyin the new world, engineers have to actually be good at capturing and interpreting requirements
reply> it's a waste of time to steer them
replyIt's not a waste of time, it's a responsibility. All things need steering, even humans -- there's only so much precision that can be extrapolated from prompts, and as the tasks get bigger, small deviations can turn into very large mistakes.
There's a balance to strike between micro-management and no steering at all.
Does the AI agent know what your company is doing right now, what every coworker is working on, how they are doing it, and how your boss will change priorities next month without being told?
replyIf it really knows better, then fire everyone and let the agent take charge. lol
A significant portion of engineering time is now spent ensuring that yes, the LLM does know about all of that. This context can be surfaced through skills, MCP, connectors, RAG over your tools, etc. Companies are also starting to reshape their entire processes to ensure this information can be properly and accurately surfaced. Most are still far from completing that transformation, but progress tends to happen slowly, then all at once.
replyNo, but Codex wouldn’t have asked you those questions either
replyFor me, it still asks for confirmation at every decision when using plans. And when multiple unforeseen options appear, it asks again. I don’t think you’ve used Codex in a while.
reply> If I tell Codex to implement 3 features he won't stop and find a general solution that unifies them unless explicitly told to
replyThat could easily be automated.