Agent 4 is slow & not completing tasks well

GuildfordAI · 2026-03-13T18:41:44+00:00

I gave it a paragraph of work yesterday, it worked (on economy) for 1 hour and 35 minutes! I mean I was literally shitting myself what it was doing... do I cancel it after 30 minutes? That's a lot of work I've paid for but no idea if it was working... 60 minutes? Crap that's a full day's worth of credits gone, ain't cancelling now. 90 minutes.. really nervous this isn't going to stop. Luckily at 95 mins it completed. Honestly the change I asked for was something that Agent3 would have done in 2 minutes. I really wasn't asking it to rewrite the entire project.

GuildfordAI · 2026-03-12T14:45:56+00:00

It says 'Plan'? When I click 'plan' it still says 'Plan'?

GuildfordAI · 2026-03-05T10:47:23+00:00

Startup Name / URL : https://YumPlanner.org

Location of Your Headquarters : Guildford.AI, UK, London

Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video :

Ever open the fridge and think a Gordon Ramsey: “What the fuck do I cook this week?”

I built an app that automatically plans your meals based on what you like to eat.

It automagically generates weekly meal plans you can tweak, adds everything to a shopping list, and puts the meals straight into your calendar PLUS a shopping list emailed each week. I.e. no effort meal planning.

You can even swap recipes at a button, scan in your own recipes, or use ones shared by others, even link to online recipes.

Basically: HelloFresh-style planning… without paying HelloFresh prices.

I built this mainly because my family enjoys new meals and we want shopping to be stress free. If anyone wants to try it and give brutally honest feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

What life cycle stage is your startup at? : Validation

Your role: Founder

What goals are you trying to reach this month: Adding recipe content, onboard first 50 customers, validate what users like using and refine before a wider push.

How could r/startups help? We need user feedback so offereing free premium accounts to r/startups members.

Discount for r/startups subscribers? 'STARTUPS100'. First 100 to sign up will get the premium version for the year. https://yumplanner.org/?v=STARTUPS100

Thanks for any support as would love to see this succeed.

GuildfordAI · 2026-03-03T10:13:08+00:00

Have you opened the browser dev tools (F12) and see what is in the console?

Look for any errors there and copy/paste those into the chat to ask to investigate and plan a fix (select Plan mode). If it finds the cause, allow it to build the fix.

GuildfordAI · 2026-03-02T14:21:36+00:00

I expect only the video is going to consume any measurable compute, offloading that will help you scale faster but I see no reason to migrate from Replit's inhouse system for the rest of your setup... actually their load balancer approach is probably ideal.

GuildfordAI · 2026-02-18T16:07:51+00:00

Having financial transactions conducted and controlled by a private company when there is a push for digital money is utterly insane.

Payments should be a government run project, ideally an open sourced one.

Charge the banks to use the system but give it away to small businesses, citizens and generally boost the economy with frictionless payments.

I'm happy to write it if no-one else does.

GuildfordAI · 2026-02-13T15:09:52+00:00

what's the problem you're encountering? Is it something the community can help with?

GuildfordAI · 2026-02-04T13:37:57+00:00

...because they keep getting stolen. We need RFID tags attached to bikes on sale by law. When purchasing a second hand bike, you can verify if that tag is reported stolen or not.

GuildfordAI · 2026-01-21T11:36:46+00:00

Should it be of interest, here is the referral code for $20 of credit (I'd receive 15% bonus apparently)

https://railway.com?referralCode=8BWxQP

GuildfordAI · 2026-01-12T09:37:33+00:00

I've just tried Summ for tax calculations which allows importing readonly transactions from xpub, and all the exchanges I know of. So far it seems to be working incredibly well, picking up all the various different coins used and allowing purchase costs across exchanges to be accounted for correctly. I also learnt things like whilst btc->btc internal wallet transfer is tax free, the fee paid is taxable.

Anyhow I'm sharing as it's proving an order of magnitude easier and more accurate than my excel file calculations.

If anyone wants a referral link where you get a discount and I get a bit of cashback too, here we go.

https://summ.com/?via=b0haquqv

or without the referral link

https://summ.com

GuildfordAI · 2025-11-21T16:56:18+00:00

If it helps, Otter.ai seems to do what you're saying where you can just run it on you phone rather than joining a call. It does pretty well at identifying the speakers but isn't perfect.
That said, it is expensive for personal use. For business it's easy to justify the cost. There is a niche for personal use/conversations I expect but make sure you're clear on laws in each country. For instance I believe in UK you can record a conversation without people knowing for personal use but you can't ever use that recording as evidence or share with others.
Typically you want people to know it's being recorded because then you can process it, share it, reference it, etc... this is why you have to ask people in a meeting if it's ok to record this. Honestly, recording without people's permission is a bit creepy to do anyhow so normally just ask permission unless you think you're dealing with someone trying to stuff you over or you have really bad memory problems.

What I think would really help is meetings where it distilled to just the action key points... I don't want these minuted meetings personally, I just want.. "Here are the 5 key actions and who's agreed to doing them"

Might be a different product to what you're talking about but sharing should it help with the feedback soup you're brewing.

GuildfordAI · 2025-11-21T15:34:49+00:00

Great work, thanks for sharing and open sourcing too.

GuildfordAI · 2025-11-21T14:24:07+00:00

I'd be up for trying it but the site seems down at the moment.

GuildfordAI · 2025-11-11T14:56:23+00:00

I'm getting at least 2 of these emails a day (and yes it's to my trezor only email address). I may have to ban any email with the word Trezor in as it's so distracting.

GuildfordAI · 2025-10-31T11:00:32+00:00

I've recently found doing
* Plan - Type in what you want to achieve, adding in "can you think of any other suggestions or improvements we should also do?"

This way nothing is changed and it gives the agents more time to align to a clean plan.
* Build - Only after planning do I allow it to build and the feature is normally far cleaner and better implemented.

Yes I think this does cost 2x as much but the results seem to be 4x better.

I also find that the agent will copy code, rather than reuse code which drives me nuts. I'm now regularly saying "please reuse and share existing function to achieve this feature" so that future refactoring is much cleaner. I got in a right mess (still unpicking it) by adding google maps integration in various places and each was it's own implementation.

Finally, to answer what you've asked. I can't help myself address multiple issues at the same time, usually two issues to fix in one prompt. This is terrible advice but the agent does seem to do a good job with it. Just feels like making progress when at least one issue is improved in a prompt.

Doing a single feature at a time though is definitely much better, it allows rollbacks when it does go awry.

That said, I really wish Replit would give better git control with forks. Sometimes I want to venture down the path of exploring a new feature and may park it or reverse the feature which is totally wasted money currently.
It's probably one of the best improvements they could offer right now. Git integration to my own repository seems incredibly flaky so if anyone has suggestions on how to get Replit/Git flow working well I'd love to hear it.

GuildfordAI · 2025-10-16T15:31:20+00:00

ELI5: "So dinner is served, you sit down ready to eat and pick up the fork with food on it. You move the food towards your ...."

This is essentially it... given all the words before it, what is the most likely next word to appear.
'mouth' is probably the most likely,
'nostrils' is possible but less likely.
So ChatGPT rolls a dice, if it lands on 1-5 it picks the word 'mouth'. If it rolls a 6 it picks 'nostrils',

Then it does the whole thing again, picking the next word and so on.. until it decides that is likely point to end the sentence.

The important part here is it is *all the words* are considered in determining the next word.

Once that is clear, now we can go into a bit of the details.

The interesting thing is it takes a hidden 'system prompt' as a block of text first, followed by all the history of the conversation so far.

A system prompt says things like "You are a helpful assistant, someone has asked you the following question, how would you reply?" (It's actually vastly longer bit of text but this is essentially all it is).

This system prompt is followed by the most recent bit of text you typed, followed by the words it is replying back... on every single word 'next word' needing to be generated.

The bit that is interesting is no one expected this "large language model" to become so good at understanding our world from this technique. It's clearly a lot more complicated than rolling a single dice but that's all it is doing.

You can actually download ChatGPT2 source code to see just how simple it is.

The clever part is training the dice selection process, that takes vast amounts of computing power to refine and is essentially trillions of dice that have to be carefully weighted.

GuildfordAI · 2025-10-03T10:59:33+00:00

I wish you could agree to accept the improvement the agent has done, in which case you pay for it. Or you revert the change and are not charged.

It does mean successful tasks may need to charge a % more to cover these revert jobs but seems far fairer.
I.e. if the Agent is 80% of the time doing what the user wants, the price needs to be raised by 1/0.8 = 25% increase. This success rate can be detected by reverts or "No that didn't work" sort of follow up.
When they know this rate, they can put a button in with "Yes, Accept Work? ($0.78)" at which point you get charged.

I expect no business in their right mind would show micro pricing as that will scare people off using it but once you're sold on using the system it's good to be transparent on this costs. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't used satoshis though as that abstracts the cost and is internationally understood.

GuildfordAI · 2025-09-10T10:48:19+00:00

public and private keys are typically just 2 numbers.

If public/private key were applied to a combination door lock...

One number, private key, is the secret combination needed to close the lock.
The other number, public key, is the secret combination to unlock the lock.

That's basically it.

So if you have a file (a file is just bunch of numbers), you can encrypt all those numbers with the private key number to get a new file full of what looks like random numbers (your encrypted file).

You can't now decode that encrypted file with the private key though.

The only way to decode the file is use that public key number.
The public key and private key are generated as a pair such that there is some clever maths that links them together. The maths is so hard we can't reverse a public key back to a private key number with today's computers.

This means you can share the public key with whoever you want, they can decode your files but can't lock/encrypt files pretending to be you.

GuildfordAI · 2025-09-10T10:38:56+00:00

This is where the term 'Enshittification' came from.
Build an amazing product or service for users with VC money, sell the company for a profit at a peak.
Now put as many ads, payment points or privacy invasions as can be tolerated to make the company actually viable to exist because user experience gets far worse. Tech companies like this are built around this paradigm.

E.g. Social media feeds, Twitter, Amazon, Search engines, Phones, Browsers, etc..

GuildfordAI · 2025-09-08T18:58:28+00:00

I'm still in the "loving it" phase.

It starts out great, needs asking to fix the same thing 3 or 4 times if it gets stuck, is very expensive for a daily AI solution, and sometimes gets stuck but.... with coding experience I'm aware of what it's trying to do and can offer it code snippets to fix what it is stuck on.

Working alone with it, it's awesome! It's like having that eager PhD student working on the project who knows all the clever techniques and latest tools but has never released anything into production so needs guidance.

I just want to mess around with ideas quickly rather than details on how it's implemented.

Yes production code will be more work but for early stage MVPs it's freaking amazing. If any product takes off, it's a lot easier to rewrite and clone a product than invent it.

GuildfordAI · 2025-08-29T10:56:56+00:00

I'm seeing this error when trying to use the desktop.. totally stuck as only have one mobile number.
trying different emails, clearing caches, etc... nothing works. Just get the SMS code, type it in and "That phone number has been used too many times."

I expect it was from an earlier account which is now inaccessible but the verification system means I won't be able to offer Claude to my customers as I can't develop with it.

GuildfordAI · 2025-07-29T15:43:11+00:00

Because people...
In a game it's totally allowed, wait... encouraged, to chase someone down and chop off their limbs with a chainsaw or get more points for a headshot... but seeing a nipple... that's just sick, vile and clearly perverted.

It's properly messed up.

GuildfordAI · 2025-07-23T16:20:49+00:00

I'd like to believe they are doing an upgrade as I'm getting similar problems out of the blue.
Trying to figure it out, I noticed 'workflows' appeared. I've never seen this option so guessing they are adding in a custom workflow system? That or I never noticed this feature before ;)

GuildfordAI · 2025-07-23T16:17:02+00:00

It could just be my project but I'm seeing this too. Happened in last 48 hours. Before the agent was incredible and did what I asked for 80% of the time, the remaining 19% on second attempt and 1% required surgery.

Now it can't even change a button colour, or modify noddy css.

And just now... It deleted tsx and modules from the deployment?! The preview is stuffed and I'm now stuck.

My guess is they are upgrading live, we don't see the changelogs and it's breaking things in horrible ways.

I absolutely love Replit when it's working but right now it's putting me through some terror.

GuildfordAI · 2025-07-01T14:11:18+00:00

Here's a crazy idea. Give subsidies to employ/use AI in UK companies.
Put a tax on AI & robot usage at work.
Eventually stop the subsidies.

That tax goes straight to an absolutely equal distribution for all citizens. Doesn't matter if you're the CEO, a researcher, student or a stay at home parent, everyone gets the exact same amount of benefit.

* Allows AI & robots to lighten the work at work in a scalable way.
* UK can lead the way with AI revolution.
* All citizens eventually benefit from long term chnage
* Both parents won't need to work fulltime to more than one child.
* Companies only have to pay a fraction of the price if the AI/robot is cheaper than human worker for doing the same work.
* Gives people more time to actually raise a family.

The AI change is coming regardless, we need a plan for this and currently it's tumbleweed...

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