how to build a coding agent
10 points by mitsuhiko
10 points by mitsuhiko
I know this isn’t central to this how-to article, but…
On the top left, we’ve got ‘prove it to me, it’s not real,’ ‘prove it to me, show me outcomes’, ‘prove it to me that it’s not hype’, and a bunch of ‘it’s not good enough’ folks who get stuck up there on that left side of the cliff, completely ignoring that there are people on the other side of the cliff, completely automating their job function.
Is there anyone who’s actually “completely automating their job function”?
I originally tagged this as ai, but someone changed it to vibecoding. I think however that this is incorrectly tagged as vibecoding because what this blog post actually shows is how to build a coding agent and that general approach generalizes to building other agents too. Building agents is a very interesting learning experience that has very little to do with “vibe coding”.
Bad news: here on Lobste.rs the “vibecoding” tag doesn’t mean vibe coding, it means any discussion around the implementation or usage of LLMs at all.
I fought this one and lost a few months ago: https://lobste.rs/s/lkngrz/new_tag_vibecoding#c_rdlpql
I had a similar thing happening to one of my posts a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/uazaax/reconstructing_music_recommendation which is squarely about machine learning from the ground up and nothing about vibecoding.
Don’t know if this is a symptom of a deeper misunderstanding or allergy to adjacent fields, or why drive-by retagging is a thing (perhaps @pushcx can comment).
I think the rough distinction could be “building models” vs “using models” with those two tags. When I look at the ai tag I see more “from the ground up” building and training than in the vibecoding tag. But the tag is not used very consistently, and I guess that’s to be expected with user-nominated tag changes.
LLMs are not the only type of AI, so it could well be about building other things, including things that build on top of them.
This article isn’t really about developing an any AI algorithm though, but rather adding an interface to it, so I kind of agree with the vibecoding tag still.