David Crespo

Uh, yeah, yeah.

Um,

Yeah, I mean, for a long time, I think until this year, really, when Cloud Code took off, I was using LLMs as kind of like a fancy search, even before they were actually search engines.

And everyone was like, it's not a search engine because you're getting this very lossy picture of what's in the model weights.

Even then, on things that they were trained very well on, which is what I work on, web dev, they were great, even just for retrieval.

So I was using them a lot for that or small snippets.

This year, I think, is when it really took off that the models could really

Do more complex autonomous things based on a very small description?

And more importantly I think pull in like what you're talking about where when the cloud code is looking at the luminous code that you have On disk it's pulling in context that it doesn't have and that's very different from yeah You know it's not so much.

You know the typical use case the typical use is you know you ask it a one-sentence question and There's only so much detail that you can get back out of it because there's just not enough texture in the question and

to tell it what to tell you back.

And so when I gave the talk about LLMs at Oxcon in September, a lot of what I stressed was the way to set up the problem for yourself is you want to give it enough so that the answer is in some sense contained in what you give it.

And what these agent tools do by just living in a repo and pulling in whatever context they want is they give themselves that texture and context.

So that's really what's changed

this year from the way I was using it a really long time ago.

I was like, I was trying to, you know, I wrote a CLI that lets you pass stuff on standard in and you can dump files into it.

But, you know, giving the things the ability to just do that stuff on their own, it makes things so much easier because you don't have to, you know, manually select a list of files to that's worth looking at.

Yeah, the early things this earlier this year were things like stubbing out like I would stub out a test.

This was this was before they got good enough to really like, you know, you can tell it the kind of the shape of the set of tests that you want and it'll write 50 tests.

Before that, it was more like you would write the title of the test and maybe five comments saying the steps of the test and it would fill in.