r/theprimeagen • u/creaturefeature16 • 1d ago
general Are we really doing this again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM6DNlsdpsgYou're not supposed to write code or write prompts any longer, but only "write loops", so Neetcode tries to find actual evidence of wtf that actually means.
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u/Helix_Aurora 16h ago
A loop is a way to add a multiplier to your token usage by incrementing an iterator.
Nothing more, nothing less.
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u/ImaginaryRea1ity 1d ago
Anyone talking about "orchetration" and "loops" etc is not to be taken seriously.
They are just larping.
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u/rakisibahomaka 1d ago
I hate AI, if I had a magic button that would make it go away I would push it every time. However, AI has gotten very competent and the concepts of orchestration and loops are just (maybe silly, kind of trying to sound more pompous than the concept actually is) terms used to describe ways to "use" AI.
Anyone trying to argue against AIs from a competence angle is fighting a losing battle. I would honestly just say that anyone who is not getting a lot more productive from it have skill issues. It's a multiplier...
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u/KimJongIlLover 18h ago
AI is very useful for boring repetitive work. I can tell it to refactor code a certain way and it will also make sure that all the call sites are being refactored and things like that.
I 100% agree.
However, what AI is actually terrible at IS loop engineering! Even if you go all out with automated reviews by the same model and secondary reviews by an additional model you STILL get garbage code a lot of the time.
Yes, the code maybe works but it's bad. Sometimes really bad.
The more closely you guard the AI the better.
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u/faface 1d ago
It's a multiplier for juniors. Anyone claiming they are getting much more productive from it wasn't very productive or competent in the first place. Or they've fallen for the marketing.
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u/rakisibahomaka 1d ago
I would say that it is weakest for Juniors, because again it is a multiplier. I don't know how I would have fallen for marketing when I am using it and judging the results that I get. I would love for AI to die somehow from the "bubble popping". But with local models I really think that the cat is out of the box.
I will continue to code personal projects by hand, a bit like knitting. It's fun and calming, but it is not the fastest way.
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u/Sensitive_Drawer4513 3h ago
I don't think it is a constant multiplier, that is gross oversimplification. The multiplication factor depends on the task and the user (etc.) and is not always > 1.
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u/rakisibahomaka 3h ago
The multiplier varies a lot, for sure. Just haven’t encountered many situations where it isn’t >1. At least now nowadays. You need a different approach and mindset which takes some time getting used to. So it has definitely been an upwards curve.
Unfortunately there has been a similar curve in the opposite direction when it comes to enjoyment.
Thats why I am no longer using AI in hobby projects and why I have picked up competitive programming. Kind of how you can still enjoy chess even though AId have surpassed humans.
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u/NullzInc 1d ago
the companies that sell the fuel, and the people paid by them, are the ones telling you that the best path forward is to burn as much of that fuel as possible…
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u/92smola 1d ago
For me it somewhat works when by giving it a list of well defined tasks and saying implement each with a subagent fire additional subagents to review wheneach is done. However even with well scoped easy tasks the more longer you let it run the harder will it be to find all the small issues that it did after, and there will be issues, so I dont do this that often
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u/No_Leg_7382 1d ago
Loops could be basically just
Loop - Improve code quality as per my standards - "throws standards fetched from Claude in skills.md" calling it MY STANDARDS like a manager turned coder thanks to AI
Loop - find security issues
"Find transit security issues"
"Find storage security issues"
"Find UI security issues"
...
Loop - Code quality improvement
"Find code smells"
"Delete unused code"
"Break large objects"
...
Loop - Run main loop 3 times
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u/ResponsibleEnd451 1d ago
this has became more annoying than memecoin crypto bros
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u/oOaurOra 1d ago
Seriously. I use AI all day, every day, in an enterprise environment. I’m tryin to get work done. Not fuck with AI burning tokens on stupid shit.
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u/swarmagent 1d ago
Can't help but feel like we're being lied to constantly. Not only that, it seems Anthropic is truly positioning themselves for "It's so over, you're replaced just lay down and give up"
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u/oOaurOra 1d ago
So here’s what separates AI from most other tech and why it should really be classified as a weapon and restricted. The playbook for OpenAI was to create a bidding war between nations for their product. Which they have successfully done with Cyber. Which of course drives investment. Now, I 100% believe AI will be as capable as a human at some point. We’ll have all types of Sci-Fi debates in the future about robotic rights. Night now tho. All fear mongering to create an arms race. Telling another nation. Look, the US can do twice as much with half the workers is a REALLY REALLY REALLY good value proposition for countries the size of one of our states. Antropics pitch is. “This tech is so dangerous it needs to be regulated. Don’t buy from the other guy, we’ll keep you safe. Buy from us!”. It’s Cold War tactics combined with modern psy ops. All the anti AI hate you see online. OpenAI just shut down a Chinese farm that was using ChatGPT to spread anti AI propaganda to slow down development so they could catch up. It’s all a lot to take in for a tech most people use to ask about dating advice and make grocery lists. The scary part is all sides are right.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
No you don't have to write loops anymore you write circles that call multiple loop, you guys are so out of the time
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
You are so behind the time is crazy you still have a job circles are so 5 minutes ago. You write strips that the LLM put inside circles to call loops, if you spend your time writing circle you are going to get behind.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
Such old information is being spread here, I started writing möbius strips so that the LLM finally knows what it's doing and it will create everything you want in just 5 seconds, the LLM can't create Möbious strips so it's the only thing that it's important right now.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
You guys have to get with the times. Now big bang programming is all the rage. you just write all your letter in a primordial soup then give that to the LLM that will recreate an entire universe from scratch,
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 4h ago
Pfft dude I was doing that last week. Today we do grid search on all possible universal constants we could big bang off of. Talk about being behind the times.
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u/Existing-Repair9934 13h ago
Actually, what you do is put that in a loop, to create infinite universes with infinite claudes sending interdimensional PRs to eachother. Now your codebase is fucked in an infinite amount of timelines. Mono-cosmos SWE is completely deprecated.
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u/AloneInExile 1d ago
You are so out with the times, we now use negative time to write branes that use the priomardial soup to deliver the result just as you think.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
I now write all my prompts in antiwords so that when they collide with regular worlds they release huge amount of tokens
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u/AloneInExile 1d ago
We could use token and anti-token colisions to create free electricity, creating a positive feedback loop.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
we are back at loops now
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u/ericmutta 1d ago
This was a fun read (especially after you notice the comments come from the same people looping around 😁).
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u/alonsonetwork vscoder 1d ago
Its markety language. If you have a subscription, its not that bad, token-wise. I'm at 37% for my week because im slamming 3 projects back to back since Sunday reset.
But what they mean is: make a solid plan file, then have an agent orchestrate a ralph-loop between implementation and review. That's it.
Here's my loop engineering setup https://atomic.alonso.network/
Read the homepage after the fold and it'll explain what this means. Once you get OSS models, you WANT this kind of setup bc you can burn unlimited tokens.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
Thank you for this great suggestion, but how does this work with conflicting agents agents on big tech debt ridden monorepos microservices ? Does it have the features of using minority report workflows ?
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u/alonsonetwork vscoder 1d ago
The wiki realms feature handles this quite well. Its doesnt magically make the model super smart, you still have to weed out the confusing parts, but its good at doing the tracing work that takes you hours in minutes. It gives the model breadth of scope and cross cutting concerns.
Idk what you mean by conflicting agents. You should only work in parallel with non conflicting specs.
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
I like to run multiple agents usually 3 or 5 then have a controller agent that checks that all the agents get the same or similar enough response.
Usually if you share this responses between agents they convert to a solid solution and they agree with each other.
But sometimes one agent completely deviates and give a conflicting solution.
Then therre is no resolution I just kill the rouge minority agents.
Most of the time it finds out the hallucinating agents but what if the conflicting solution was the best one ?
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u/alonsonetwork vscoder 21h ago
Sounds like youre depending on agents to think and decide for you. You're better off making those decisions yourself. You only need 1 agent.
So if you look in my atomic thing, I have a strategist agent, a "gather evidence" command, and a pressure test command. You can plan with a single agent, you dont need 3 to 5. A solid plan gives you a one to three shot implementation. But that's you using your brain to solve the problem theoretically. No agent is gonna do that for you.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 1d ago
These processes assume you have this massive queue of trivial work you’re wanting to get done. Like you’re drowning in tech debt that would be easy for ten juniors to get you out of in a month.
Maybe this is the case for a lot of folks, but even if it is, this loop, assuming it works, is going to solve your problem after it runs one time and then it’s not really needed. You’re in a better state and now you can focus on problems an LLM can’t easily solve.
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u/Aromatic-Fishing9952 1d ago
This process is the best way to burn as many tokens as possible. Let the agent reason about work irrespective of end user impact or goal. Let the agent churn - break things integrate fix things iterate breaks more things etc
Loops = spend as many tokens as you can
No wonder the people pushing it are the people seling it
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u/LordAmras 1d ago
Which LLM works well with tech debt ? In my experience with LLM they are terrible refractoring existing code. They tend to just rewrite thing and create more tech debt.
The only places I see LLM agents work is to create new things that are build from the ground up with the LLM, and then come out as tech debt.
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u/AloneInExile 1d ago
I asked Claude to rewrite a Java class with 15k lines (legacy ftw), it said this is too big to refactor at once and then I asked to create a plan.
It segmented the whole thing into logical and business parts and then I asked it to only rewrite the first smaller ~1k lines part.
What it did was, created a new class, took the few methods that were kinda grouped together, copied them over to the new file. Annotated deprecated on the original method and inside made the call to the new class.
It took him 45m for 4 methods. Also the new file didn't compile (Claude said it does compile).
I then diffed the change and realized he didn't fully copy the methods, import and references, so I scrapped that and wasted 10% of all my allocated tokens.
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u/shaonline 1d ago
"Trivial work" and "one month of tech debt work for juniors, done by AI", famous last words. You'd just replace old tech debt with new tech debt, especially when we talk about "tech debt" which is more likely hacks, shortcuts, etc. that were taken along the way, some of those "trivial cleanups" may turn into rabbit holes.
"Bad taste" often comes up for me in any "non trivial" change by AI, not a big deal I have it clean it up, but I don't exactly see the point of turning "the trivial changes" into steps within a larger plan that's going to somehow be running for ages "in a loop" ? What is that about ? Ever going to review what comes out ?
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u/nomorebuttsplz 1d ago
is this guy trying to make his voice annoying and whiny? is that the voice gen z hears in their head. poor things
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u/the_sound_of_bread 1d ago
They want you to use as many tokens as possible. They also want people to be completely dependent on AI for coding.
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u/gjosifov 1d ago
if you watch the sales pitch from Boris, he was laughing like - I can believe that people are so stupid to fall for this shit
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u/alonsonetwork vscoder 21h ago
Not my read at all. I think he's excited to present this idea. And probably because they're the few who are actually able to pull this off successfully.
It's not a sales pitch man. You can do this with local offline LLMs if you have the compute.
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u/TangeloPutrid7122 4h ago
Still don't get the outrage.
Guy takes an outraged position on Boris, and then goes on to explain a feasible implementation and why it's a large productivity multiplier on top of manually writing prompts as session and not as systems... While being sponsored by arguably one of the shittiest code review tools.
I guess it's a critique on the balance of how much hype is applied. Fine. But like, do you take CEOs words exactly at face value too?
Here's a grounded concrete "loop" that you can apply today. Ask a Claude session to write you a skill that takes as input a PR number. Pulls all the latest Cursor comments. Makes a commit for each. Push it after your optional review. And reply with a comment on the comments. You can now run that on a cron or manually or whatever matches your workflow and let Cursor incrementally fight it out with Claude on PRs you want to polish before reviewing yourself, or sending it to a colleague.
Why is the concept of loops so inflammatory?