Don't waste your back pressure

(banay.me)

50 points | by ghuntley 1 day ago

10 comments

  • waterproof 57 minutes ago
    "Back pressure" is already a term widely used in computing for something entirely different: https://schmidscience.com/what-does-back-pressure-in-compute...
    • jagged-chisel 34 minutes ago
      I have the same argument with “crypto”
      • andai 9 minutes ago
        And web 3? ;)
  • asmvolatile 0 minutes ago
    Back pressure is not a good name for this. You already listed one that makes more sense - “feedback”
  • qazxcvbnmlp 7 minutes ago
    My mental model is that ai coding tools are machines that can take a set of constraints and turn them into a piece of code. The better you get at having it give its self those constraints accurately, the higher level task you can focus on.

    Eg compiler errors, unit tests, mcp, etc.

    Ive heard of these; but havent tried them yet.

    https://github.com/hmans/beans https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown

    Right now i spent a lot of “back pressure” on fitting the scope of the task into something that will fit in one context window (ie the useful computation, not the raw token count). I suspect we will see a large breakthrough when someone finally figures out a good system for having the llm do this.

  • jandrewrogers 53 minutes ago
    This use of the term “back pressure” is pretty confusing in a computer science context.
  • skybrian 1 hour ago
    This jumps to proof assistants and barely mentions fuzzing. I've found that with a bit of guidance, Claude is pretty good at suggesting interesting properties to test and writing property tests to verify that invariants hold.
    • ekidd 41 minutes ago
      If you give Claude examples of good and bad property tests, and explain why, it gets much better than it was out of the box.
  • anditherobot 15 minutes ago
    With Visual Studio and Copilot I like the fact that runs a comment and then can read the output back and then automatically continues based on the error message let's say there's a compilation error or a failed test case, It reads it and then feeds that back into the system automatically. Once the plan is satisfied, it marks it as completed
  • sh3rl0ck 56 minutes ago
    Beyond Linting and Shell Exec (gh, Playwright etc), what other additional tools did you find useful for your tasks, HN?!

    Most of my feedback that can be automated is done either by this or by fuzzing. Would love to hear about other optimisations y'all have found.

    • alphax314 9 minutes ago
      Running all shorts of tests (e2e, API, unit) and for web apps using the claude extension with chrome to trigger web ui actions and observe the result. The last part helps a lot with frontend development.
    • sigseg1v 40 minutes ago
      Teaching them skills for running API and e2e tests and how to filter those tests so it can check if what it did works quickly.
  • didip 44 minutes ago
    I thought you are talking about back pressure pipes in my housing complex.

    I’ve been wondering why I can’t use it to generate electricity.

  • refulgentis 46 minutes ago
    Others have pointed out the incongruity of back pressure here, I would have loved “feedback”.