One of my main issues with these guys is their context window. Their memory. It's hard to see a LLM working on a code-base a few thousand tokens at a time and still being precise about it. To do that you need summary techniques. Feeding prompt with incrementally compressed summaries and hoping it will maintain cohesion.

That sounds a lot like trying to let the CEO of a company do all the grunt work by feeding him summaries. "Mr Gates, here's a 2 paragraph summary of our codebase. Should we name the class AnalogyWidgetProducer or FactoryWidgetAnalogyReporter?"

I don't think that's going to work.

My gut feeling is that what we call corporations are actually already a form of AI, but running on meat. I saw someone call Coca Cola a "paper clip maximizer", obviously for drinks instead of paper clips, but it actually - kind of - is. FWIW, I'm having a hard time thinking of it as anything else. Who controls it? What is it anyway?

CEOs have the same context window problem, which to my knowledge is mainly solved through delegation. The army might be another example. Generals, officers, privates. How do you expect a general to make sensible statements about nitty-gritty operational details? It is not possible, but that does not mean the system as-a-whole cannot make progress towards a goal.

Maybe we need to treat LLMs like employees inside a company (which in its totality is the AI, not the individual agents). If we have unfettered access to low-cost LLMs this might be easier to experiment with.

I'm thinking like spinning up an LLM for every "class" or even every "method" in your codebase and letting it be a representative of that and only that piece of code. You can even call it George and let it join in on meetings to talk about it. George needs some "management" too, so there you go. Soon you'll have a veritable army of systems ready to talk about your code from their point-of-view. Black box the son of a gun and you're done. Clippy 2.0. My body is ready.