Show HN: Nous – Open-Source Agent Framework with Autonomous, SWE Agents, WebUI

This looks fantastic! I've been using aider and had my own scripts to automate some things with it, but this looks next level and beyond.

I wanted to try this out (specifically the web UI), so I configured the env file, adjusted the docker compose file, ran `docker compose up` and it "just works".

It would be great if there was a basic agent example or two pre-configured, so you can set this up and instantly get a better sense of how everything works from a more hands-on perspective.

I have a few steps so far in the code editing at https://github.com/TrafficGuard/nous/blob/main/src/swe/codeE... There is a first pass I initially created when I was re-running a partially completed task and it would sometimes duplicate what already had been done. This helps Aider focus on what to do.

  ${fileContents}
  ${requirements}
  You are a senior software engineer. Your task is to review the provided user requirements against the code provided and produce an implementation design specification to give to a developer to implement the changes in the files.
  Do not provide any details of verification commands etc as the CI/CD build will run integration tests. Only detail the changes required in the files for the pull request.
  Check if any of the requirements have already been correctly implemented in the code as to not duplicate work.
  Look at the existing style of the code when producing the requirements.

Then there is a compile/lint/test loops which feeds back in the error messages, and in the case of compile errors the diff since the last compiling commit. Aider added some similar functionality recently.

Then finally there's a review step which asks:

  Do the changes in the diff satisfy the requirements, and explain why? Are there any redundant changes in the diff? Was any code removed in the changes which should not have been? Review the style of the code changes in the diff carefully against the original code.  Do the changes follow all the style conventions of the original code?

This helps catch issues that Aider inadvertently introduced, or missed.

I have some ideas around implementing workflows that mimic what we do. For example if you have a tricky bug, add a .only to the relevant describe/it tests (or create tests if they dont exist) add lots of logging and assertions to pinpoint the fix required, then undo the .only and extra logging. Thats whats going to enable higher overall success rates, which you can see the progress in the SWE-bench lite leaderboard as simple RAG implementations had up to ~4% success rate with Opus, while the agentic solutions are reaching 43% pass rate on the full suite.

No, a chat bot using tools (e.g. GPTs) is an "assistant."

An LLM agent is not a chat bot, unlike an assistant. It is a primarily or fully autonomous LLM driven application which "chats" primarily with itself and/or other agents.

In other words, assistants primarily interact with humans while agents primarily interact with themselves and other agents.

To have it deployed costs nothing to run with the Cloud Run and Firestore free tier.

As for LLM costs that really depends what you're trying to do when it. Fortunately that cost is always coming down. When I was first building it with Claude Opus the costs did add up, but 100 days later we have 3.5 Sonnet at a fraction of the cost.

The Aider benchmarks are good to see how different LLMs perform for coding/patch generation. Sonnet 3.5 is best if it's in the budget. DeepSeek coder v2 gives the best bang for buck https://aider.chat/2024/07/25/new-models.html

And there is https://nous.technology/, known for their smart plugs.