Devs debate agent self-modification: an external LLM while-loop beats harness rewriting
lucasmeijer · x · 2026-10-12
lucasmeijer pushes back on the idea of agents self-modifying their own harness. He argues it's simpler for an agent to just write an external program with an LLM in a while loop to get whatever behavior it needs, rather than initiate self-modification. @pidotdev, author of pi, responds that pi's "self-modification" is always user-initiated — the user wants new behavior and pi writes it — and he struggles to imagine scenarios where an agent would want to modify its own harness. lucasmeijer adds that a "code mode" seems like the better solution for such cases.
Related event: Debate erupts over agent self-modification in pi(3 posts)→
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