Hacker News: antleys

New comment by antleys in "The State of Context Engineering"

antleys — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:52:44 +0000

> When building intelligent applications, harnesses, and workflows, our job is to choose when to be deterministic (what to put in code) and when to be probabilistic (when to let the model drive).

I really like this final sentence from the presentation. When I read this phrase, I realized that it captured one of the core dynamics that I've been using to figure out when and how to apply AI to a task. I often find myself trying to figure out if it is better to A) ask the AI to do a task for me or B) ask the AI to build something that can do the task for me. A major component of that answer comes down to how deterministic or probabilistic the task is.

New comment by antleys in "Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs"

antleys — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:29:21 +0000

This article is not about "reasoning" in the abstract, philosophical sense but is talking about "mechanistic interpretability" research. The title is more like, "can we understand if the 'knowledge' encoded into a neural networks actually corresponds to reasoning-like concepts" and doing that with actual experiments like tweaking weights and activations.

There's an interesting example where researchers saw a model approached clock time calculations and calendar month-day calculations using the same methodology. So then is this because an underlying concept of "cyclical measures" has emerged in the network?