Because, knowing what to induce in its behavior is the key - by understanding things like Postels law, I can direct the agentic loop towards patterns of development that avoid the cascade of issues that seem endemic in modern agentic harnesses.
In fact, this is a key insight, so it’s surprising you didn’t get the punchline. Trying to build things in a new way on a machine composed of the corpus of all the old ways is stupid. By eliciting the corpus of tried and true methods over the history of computing and process engineering as the grounding for how to develop and behave in processes, you offload a huge amount of the work in getting software that’s “right” for the domain you’re working in. But not being aware of them and being heedless that the techniques hard won were hard won by people at least or more smart than you facing similar problems is leading to a cycle in software that’s needlessly dumb, making stupid mistakes that are unnecessary.
There was a great Star Trek NG episode where Picard is stranded on a planet with a creature that can only speak in metaphorical language. Every sentence it uses refers to an event in the past and you have to understand it’s history to understand it today. Because LLMs are entirely trained on historical corpus, there is no time in history when all the techniques and processes and system design thinking was more relevant. Like that episode, Darmok, you can elicit a wealth of experience by simply referring to a technique from the past - if you know what it is.
Another way to put it , those that aren’t aware of their history are doomed to repeat it. The sad part of the situation is the coding agent you’re working with is fully trained on it, but unless you intentionally activate the semantic space and bring the concepts into its J-space you won’t maximize the value of that corpus. So, we are using these tools which are mostly crap duct-taped together, which suffer from flaws well understood for decades, mostly because of the driving human being ignorant of the available corpus.
In fact, this is a key insight, so it’s surprising you didn’t get the punchline. Trying to build things in a new way on a machine composed of the corpus of all the old ways is stupid. By eliciting the corpus of tried and true methods over the history of computing and process engineering as the grounding for how to develop and behave in processes, you offload a huge amount of the work in getting software that’s “right” for the domain you’re working in. But not being aware of them and being heedless that the techniques hard won were hard won by people at least or more smart than you facing similar problems is leading to a cycle in software that’s needlessly dumb, making stupid mistakes that are unnecessary.
There was a great Star Trek NG episode where Picard is stranded on a planet with a creature that can only speak in metaphorical language. Every sentence it uses refers to an event in the past and you have to understand it’s history to understand it today. Because LLMs are entirely trained on historical corpus, there is no time in history when all the techniques and processes and system design thinking was more relevant. Like that episode, Darmok, you can elicit a wealth of experience by simply referring to a technique from the past - if you know what it is.
Another way to put it , those that aren’t aware of their history are doomed to repeat it. The sad part of the situation is the coding agent you’re working with is fully trained on it, but unless you intentionally activate the semantic space and bring the concepts into its J-space you won’t maximize the value of that corpus. So, we are using these tools which are mostly crap duct-taped together, which suffer from flaws well understood for decades, mostly because of the driving human being ignorant of the available corpus.