Yet another Hacker News

Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team

41 points rafiss 1 day ago 16 comments

ajstorm 1 day ago | parent

Rafi and I, who authored this post, will be hanging out here for any questions people may have.

contingencies 1 hour ago | parent

Which inherent limitations did you recognize in the metaphor before commencing this research?

Eridrus 30 minutes ago | parent

Did you do any ablation studies on what is actually useful vs what happens to just work because these systems can work around whatever people do?

I compare this to OpenAI's symphony prompt which, at a high level, does exactly the same thing outlined here except model selection and doesn't really have the need for roles or hospital metaphors.

jordanlewis 1 day ago | parent

Great post!

One thing I've been experimenting with in my own agent orchestration system is an agent that hangs around and does post-merge acceptance testing after the work ships. Any plans to add a follow-up phase? Travel nurse?

ajstorm 1 day ago | parent

That's a very interesting idea. Sounds more like a "routine follow-up" in the medical model.

Spooky23 1 hour ago | parent

Reminds me of the “surgical team” development model in the Mythical Man Month.

james_marks 1 hour ago | parent

A hint at why GitHub actions have been unreliable. How many teams are running factories like this on GH infra now?

gchamonlive 38 minutes ago | parent

This is Microsoft scale, I'd be surprised if it made any difference these labs. It's more likely it's plain managerial mishandling of the infra in chasing new profit heights.

devin 20 minutes ago | parent

I posted in another threat about this: I am seeing a lot of people building their own little bespoke factories. They introduce endless quality gates until it slows development down, and then they add more agents to decide when to run certain actions, and on and on. The end result from what I've seen and personally participated in, is that it often winds up providing negative value in the software development lifecycle. It creates a whole lot of heat, but IMO is not helping the teams utilizing them to ship value any faster than they would with a more limited setup.

git_rancher 42 minutes ago | parent

The patient “leaves” when the bug is fixed?

tough 28 minutes ago | parent

What would be the analogy if the patient dies?

unrented7977 20 minutes ago | parent

Bug becomes a feature

kinduff 18 minutes ago | parent

Since we are all building our version of this, what mistakes did you made until you arrived to a well-balanced solution? I really like that you know how much an issue is, because then you can start optimizing.

Veelox 14 minutes ago | parent

You give a very precise measure of redundancy in the skills. Can you give a bit more detail in how you decided you needed to audit them and how you went about it? Was it fully agent driven? Mostly human?

dingaling911 9 minutes ago | parent

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't really see anything about the long term quality or maintainability of the code. All I see is agent agent agent.

finnborge 8 minutes ago | parent

This feels to me like a lovely example of both high-quality systems design and information theory. From my perspective, one of the more abstractly interesting thoughts surfaced by this write-up is the degree to which you've "encoded" a highly complex set of relationships through use of metaphor.

That type of encoding (starting with the statement: you're at a teaching hospital) is profoundly more efficient than having to deeply and reliably articulate what each of the various roles your agents embody are, let alone their interactions.

Perhaps there is more room for any of us to consider what existing systems or identities are described abundantly in training sets and can be leveraged to ritualistically encode these social/civic/cultural dynamics saying: "act as though you're ___." Not exactly a new point, but one this write-up certainly is pulling me towards.

Thank you for sharing and the care you put into writing this!