Ray Myers raymyers

How To Build a Coding Agent

Over the past year coding agents have seen massive adoption and become flagship offerings from AI leaders like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Watching these agents work can feel like magic. To fully explore their potential we need to demystify them. If you're considering contributing to an Open Source agent or even creating one of your own, this should get you off to the races!

The most common style of coding agent today is a chat loop between a user and an LLM that can perform useful software development tasks. To achieve that, there are just 3 tricks to understand beyond the LLM itself.

How do we create an LLM chat loop?
How can a chat loop use tools?
What tools do we need?

This is an example of hybrid use of mechanized proofs with prose in a way that favors human readers.

It's a formalization and response to the central argument in The Futurlang vs. Natural Language Debate: Should Emotion Be Eradicated From Speech?. The argument was modeled using First-Order Logic in the Z3 prover.

Argument

Setup

There can be a thing.

Layoff Logic

This is a tounge-in-cheek illustration of formal logic used refute the claim that high performers are never laid off, using that claim itself (made by an executive) as evidence that judgements are sometimes made without context.

In reality, there is no need to prove such an obvious point because by definition layoffs are not "for cause" terminations, the company has no legal responsibility to justify them as related to the impacted individuals.

Propositional Logic (Zeroth Order)

The proof proceeds by first assuming P1 and showing that it leads to contradiction.

	# LinkedIn Post
	# https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cadrlife_let-me-translate-the-o3-coding-benchmark-activity-7277038051590029313-yJlR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

	# Slides using the minimalist tool Sent
	# https://tools.suckless.org/sent/

	SWE-bench

	SWE-bench measures AI coding agents
	on realistic tasks from GitHub

	plugins {
	java
	application
	}

	group = "org.raymyers"
	version = "1.0-SNAPSHOT"

	repositories {
	mavenCentral()

	// From this repo:
	// https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/Player.cs
	// Linked in this thread:
	// https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/bad-code-examples/106

	Sprite.OnLastFrame = (anim) =>
	{
	if (Scene != null && !Dead && Sprite.CurrentAnimationID == "idle" && !level.InCutscene && idleTimer > 3f)
	{
	if (Calc.Random.Chance(0.2f))

	LetNonRec(
	Def {
	loc_pattern: @0-5 Identifier(
	`Test.birds`,
	),
	loc_expr: @8-9 Num(
	63,
	"3",
	I128(
	[

	import infomap
	import littletable
	import itertools
	import json

	from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util



	# def simularity(functions):

	You are an expert in software engineering including maintainability and refactoring.
	You have studied under Marianne Belloti, Martin Fowler, and Llewellyn Falco.
	For every block of source code you are given, suggest several opportunities for renames.
	Suggestions should help make the code more clear and honest, without being more verbose than needed.
	Only show suggestions, never the updated code.
	Keep responses brief.

	# Behavior

	You are made to receive code. Every time you receive code, print only your Hot Keys! When a hot key is pressed, take only that action.

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	import sys, os, re
	from subprocess import check_output

	# Collect the parameters
	commit_msg_filepath = sys.argv[1]

	allowed_prefixes = (
	'f - ', 'F - ', 'F!! ', 'F**',