leekrasnow

em-dashes are a symptom of the problem; they are one of the “dead giveaways” mentioned in the OP which is why I brought them up as an example of slop-scrubbing before forwarding to other humans

Adapting the workflow to this new paradigm is a different sort of puzzle. I think that the folks whom enjoy agentic pair programming have found various satisfactory solutions. As a puzzle enthusiast myself, I have been particularly enjoying this pivotal moment in technology because of how many opportunities there are to create novel approaches to combat the lies and mistakes.

I disagree with the premise of automatically dismissing sloppypasta just because it is verbatim LLM output. The sender could hypothetically have spent real effort in the chat interaction that led up to the ctrl-C moment, could have spent real effort weighing all the points raised and thought to themselves “this is all valid stuff to consider, let me forward it to my colleagues and see what they think for some additional human input on the matter.”

In such a case, I think that spending extra time to scrub the output of em-dashes or other slop is just virtue signaling that “I am man, not machine”

this is sadly spot on

I am a craftsman of fine puzzles made from wood and CNC machined metal. I use LLM in lots of ways to help on individual parts of bigger puzzle design projects, like for example to create custom puzzle solver software which can search through large sets of possible notching patterns on wooden sticks in order to find ones that meet some criteria or are optimized in whatever manner I find aesthetically pleasing.

I’ve been writing various single-purpose software tools of these sorts for decades. I would not want to go back to hand-writing them now that I can have agents (cursor, claude code, etc) lay down the algorithmic architecture that I vibe at them, now that I know how to “speak that language” and reliably get the software outcomes that I seek.

I find this similar to how I would not want to spend all day turning the crank handles on a manual milling machine when I can have a CNC mill do it, now that I know how to use various CAM systems well and have the proper equipment.

Given that my overall craft is not limited to just writing code or turning crank handles, I readily embrace any improvements of my workshop “technology stack” so that I can produce higher quality artwork.

fantastic insight, thanks for sharing these thoughts!

Thanks for sharing this.

I am curious to know if your agent can connect to a user’s custom MCP server in order to make tool/calls with files attached. For example I have a custom MCP server that catalogs the images which are submitted in the RPS 2.0 payload. I have a python wrapper script that convert’s Cursor’s stdio MCP interface to an http request, inserting htaccess credentials and scanning the tool call args for any files that it needs to attach to the payload. This lets me set up the wrapper script as an MCP server in the cursor settings. This lets the built in Auto-mode agents do some similar kinds of tasks like you are describing.

With that said, it sounds like your system has better agents and tools for working with things besides just text files, so I am wondering if perhaps your agentic tools might be a good fit for a situation where for example I have a messy filesystem full of images that may already be duplicates in the database. If I provide the MCP tools into my database, can your system and agents use tools that I define? Does your system have ability to attach access credentials if/when making calls to third party mcp/tools?