Absolutely, especially the part about just rolling your own alternative to Claude Code - build your own lightsaber. Having your coding agent improve itself is a pretty magical experience. And then you can trivially swap in whatever model you want (Cerebras is crazy fast, for example, which makes a big difference for these many-turn tool call conversations with big lumps of context, though gpt-oss 120b is obviously not as good as one of the frontier models). Add note-taking/memory, and ask it to remember key facts to that. Add voice transcription so that you can reply much faster (LLMs are amazing at taking in imperfect transcriptions and understanding what you meant). Each of these things takes on the order of a few minutes, and it's super fun.
You should write an agent
41–50 of 409 posts
Re: You should write an agent
#42It's interesting how much this makes you want to write Unix-style tools that do one thing and only one thing really well. Not just because it makes coding an agent simpler, but because it's much more secure!
One thing that radicalized me was building an agent that tested network connectivity for our fleet. Early on, in like 2021, I deployed a little mini-fleet of off-network DNS probes on, like, Vultr to check on our DNS routing, and actually devising metrics for them and making the data that stuff generated legible/operationalizable was annoying and error prone. But you can give basic Unix network tools --- ping, dig, t…
Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot.
Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D
Re: You should write an agent
#43> Imagine what it’ll do if you give it bash. You could find out in less than 10 minutes. Spoiler: you’d be surprisingly close to having a working coding agent. Okay, but what if I'd prefer not to have to trust a remote service not to send me { "output": [ { "type": "function_call", "command": "rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" } ] } ?
Obviously if you're concerned about that, which is very reasonable, don't run it in an environment where `rm -rf` can cause you a real problem.
Re: You should write an agent
#44> Imagine what it’ll do if you give it bash. You could find out in less than 10 minutes. Spoiler: you’d be surprisingly close to having a working coding agent. Okay, but what if I'd prefer not to have to trust a remote service not to send me { "output": [ { "type": "function_call", "command": "rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" } ] } ?
Obviously if you're concerned about that, which is very reasonable, don't run it in an environment where `rm -rf` can cause you a real problem.
Also if you're doing function calls you can just have the command as one response param, and arguments array as another response param. Then just black/white list commands you either don't want to run or which should require a human to say ok.
Re: You should write an agent
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if we could develop a language with well-defined semantics to interact with and wire up those tools.
> language with well-defined semantics That would certainly be nice! That's why we have been overhauling shell with https://oils.pub , because shell can't be described as that right now It's in extremely poor shape e.g. some things found from building several thousand packages with OSH recently (decades of accumulated shell scripts) - bugs caused by the differing behavior of 'echo hi | read x; echo x=$x' in shells, i…
I love it how you went from 'Shell-WTFs' to 'let's fix this'. Kudos, most people get stuck at the first stage.
Re: You should write an agent
#46Write an agent, it's easy! You will learn so much! ... let's see ... client = OpenAI() Um right. That's like saying you should implement a web server, you will learn so much, and then you go and import http (in golang). Yeah well, sure, but that brings you like 98% of the way there, doesn't it? What am I missing?
No, it's saying "let's build a web service" and starting with a framework that just lets you write your endpoints. This is about something higher level than the nuts and bolts. Both are worth learning.
The fact you find this trivial is kind of the point that's being made. Some people think having an agent is some kind of voodoo, but it's really not.
Re: You should write an agent
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that radicalized me was building an agent that tested network connectivity for our fleet. Early on, in like 2021, I deployed a little mini-fleet of off-network DNS probes on, like, Vultr to check on our DNS routing, and actually devising metrics for them and making the data that stuff generated legible/operationalizable was annoying and error prone. But you can give basic Unix network tools --- ping, dig, t…
Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot. Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D
Interesting. You have to wonder if all the tools that is based on would have been written in the first place if that kind of thing had been possible all along. Who needs 'grep' when you can write a prompt?
Re: You should write an agent
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if we could develop a language with well-defined semantics to interact with and wire up those tools.
As it happens, I have a prototype for this, but the syntax is honestly rather unwieldy. Maybe there's a way to make it more like natural human language....
I can't tell whether any comment in this thread is a parody or not.
Re: You should write an agent
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot. Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D
Interesting. You have to wonder if all the tools that is based on would have been written in the first place if that kind of thing had been possible all along. Who needs 'grep' when you can write a prompt?
My long running joke is that the actual good `jq` is just the LLM interface that generates `jq` queries; 'simonw actually went and built that.
Re: You should write an agent
#50It is also very simple to be a programmer.. see, print "Hello world!" so easy...
But that didn't use the H100 I just bought to put me out of my own job!