Fragments: September 29

The useful part

While things like vibe coding get a lot of attention, the real strength of agentic programming relies on more sophisticated techniques. It's a reason I'm wary of extrapolating my own dabblings into firm opinions about how to use the genie. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Harper Reed explored what turns agents into hackers by creating a breakaway agent It ran and ran attacking all the machines on the same subnet, and was very effective.

How it works

• It didn't really get very far, but it exhausted a lot of options, and was pretty fun to watch.
• He usually doesn't see agents trying to do stuff like this because there's a limit on how many turns they can take.
• They don't give up once it appears impossible, they just keep trying to figure out how to solve it.
• (Just a reminder that this was on my local network with local boxes.
• For this experiment he gave them unlimited tokens by using an open weight model.

What to take from it

They are very effective at attacking these types of problems.

Details worth keeping

This type of experience must be part of a lot of these LLMs training.