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Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

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Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#51

> Each agent is a TOML config with a focused job. Such as code reviewer, log analyzer, commit message writer. You can run them from the CLI, pipe data in, get results out. I'm a bit skeptical of this approach, at least for building general purpose coding agents. If the agents were humans, it would be absolutely insane to assign such fine-grained responsibilities to multiple people and ask them to collaborate.

Clankers are not humans.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#54

I really like seeing the movement away from MCP across the various projects. Here the composition of the new with the old (the ol' unix composability) seems to um very nicely. OP, what have you used this on in practice, with success?

I've shared a few flows I use a lot right now in some other comments.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#56
post #20
post #17

12MB for an "AI framework replacement"? That's either brilliant compression or someone's redefining "framework" to mean "toy model that works on my laptop." Show me the benchmarks on actual workloads, not the readme poetry.

This is not an LLM but a Binary to run LLMs as single purpose agents that can chain together.

Yeah I was disappointed by that too.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#58
post #44

The Unix-style framing resonates a lot. One thing I’ve noticed when experimenting with agent pipelines is that the “single-purpose agent” model tends to make both cost control and reasoning easier. Each agent only gets the context it actually needs, which keeps prompts small and behavior easier to predict. Where it gets interesting is when the pipeline starts producing artifacts instead of just text — reports, logs,…

> Curious if you’ve experimented with workflows where agents produce artifacts (files, reports, etc.) rather than just returning text. Yes! I run a ghost blog (a blog that does not use my name) and have axe produce artifacts. The flow is: I send the first agent a text file of my brain dump (normally spoken) which it then searched my note system for related notes, saves it to a file, then passes everything to agent 2…

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#59
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Curious if you’ve experimented with workflows where agents produce artifacts (files, reports, etc.) rather than just returning text. Yes! I run a ghost blog (a blog that does not use my name) and have axe produce artifacts. The flow is: I send the first agent a text file of my brain dump (normally spoken) which it then searched my note system for related notes, saves it to a file, then passes everything to agent 2…

That’s a really nice pipeline. The “save to file between steps” pattern seems to appear very naturally once agents start doing multi-stage work. One thing I’ve noticed when experimenting with similar workflows is that once artifacts start accumulating (drafts, logs, intermediate reports, etc.), you start running into small infrastructure questions pretty quickly: – where intermediate artifacts live – how later agents…

In my prompting framework I have a workflow that the agent would scan all the artifacts in my closed/ folder and create a yyyymmdd-archive artifact which records all artifact name and their summaries, then just delete them. Since the framework is deeply integrated with git, the artifact can be digged up from git history via the recorded names.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#60

> Each agent is a TOML config with a focused job. Such as code reviewer, log analyzer, commit message writer. You can run them from the CLI, pipe data in, get results out. I'm a bit skeptical of this approach, at least for building general purpose coding agents. If the agents were humans, it would be absolutely insane to assign such fine-grained responsibilities to multiple people and ask them to collaborate.

It is easier to trust in the correctness and reliability of an LLM when you treat it as a glorified NLP function with a very narrow scope and limited responsibilities. That is to say, LLMs rarely mess up specific low level instructions, compared to open-ended, long-horizon tasks.
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