LLMs (and agent coding tools in particular) love a fitness function. Give them a tool that indicates success or failure and they’ll go to town. Compiler errors, linter warnings—they love that stuff.

They also seem to love deleting failing tests—maybe they’re more human than we’d like. 😅

Never before has the exit status of Unix commands been so important—the clarity of errors, logging messages, and progress displays are all suddenly crucial. Well-written text, whether it’s a prompt, error, or informative log message, nudges LLMs towards the right next step just like it would for a human.

Any task with a decent fitness function—an LLM will handle it soon. Currently, they’re limited by human response times and gumption. But once we’re confident enough in their performance and the safeguards we’ve put up, a lot of them will be out there, just doing stuff and starting tasks based on what they predict needs doing. Wild times ahead!