Astro Hacker News - Autolith: A programming agent with a live runtime

a2ff6eeb0 |next [-]

Given that the most important feature for agent performance is the popularity of the language, ie, the amount of training data, (https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/), why would you cause problems for yourself by using Lisp rather than Python/Javascript if you care mainly about results fast, or C/C++/Rust if you care about performance too?

jbott |root |parent [-]

> the most important feature for agent performance is the popularity of the language

This is explicitly called out as only weakly supported in that blog post:

  - You should use a popular language
    - There's weak support for this statement

a2ff6eeb0 |root |parent [-]

Feel free to do your own analysis -- my informal experiments backs this up, though. I see worse results when I try to do anything in an unpopular language.

It makes sense, needing to train the model on things that aren't already in its weighs takes up valuable context. Until we have models that update their weights based on what they've seen in their recent sessions and learn like people, this will be a problem.

For now, though, between the results I'm seeing here, and the lack of need to look at code, I think this kills off any reason for me to use less popular languages.

jauntywundrkind |root |parent [-]

Your attempt was probably pretty, ahem, weak. How much support would you say you gave your goes, before you threw in the towel?

I don't think there's really ever a downside to leaning in and making use of a language or system that works for you. Trying to tell people they should just use the popular thing is, imo, bad advice to turn hackers and experimenters into boring people.

rufius |next |previous [-]

This is an interesting idea. I was thinking about something similar in Smalltalk or Erlang the other day. Mostly building on the actor/object+mailbox concept.

I didn’t actually do anything with that idea yet but may look at the idea in Elixir this weekend.

yogthos |previous [-]

Amusingly, I started building something very similar in Jolt today :) https://github.com/yogthos/samizdat/