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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#91

Post by solarkraft »

rbren wrote: post #79

Spoiler: it's not actually that easy. Compaction, security, sandboxing, planning, custom tools--all this is really hard to get right. We're about to launch an SDK that gives devs all these building blocks, specifically oriented around software agents. Would love feedback if anyone wants to look: https://github.com/OpenHands/software-agent-sdk

How autonomous/controllable are the agents with this SDK?

When I build an agent my standard is Cursor, which updates the UI at every reportable step of the way, and gives you a ton of control opportunities, which I find creates a lot of confidence.

Is this level of detail and control possible with the OpenHands SDK? I’m asking because the last SDK that was simple to get into lacked that kind of control.

Re: You should write an agent

#93

Post by hoppp »

I should? what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent? As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss starting a sustainably monetizable project doesn't feel that realistic.

Re: You should write an agent

#95

Post by furyofantares »

wayy wrote: post #88

everybody loves building agents, nobody likes debugging them. agents hit the classic llm app lifecycle problem: at first it feels magical. it nails the first few tasks, doing things you didn’t even think were possible. you get excited, start pushing it further. you run it and then it fails on step 17, then 41, then step 9. now you can’t reproduce it because it’s probabilistic. each step takes half a second, so you si…

That's why you build extensive tooling to run your change hundreds of times in parallel against the context you're trying to fix, and then re-run hundreds of past scenarios in parallel to verify none of them breaks.

Re: You should write an agent

#97

Post by bilbo0s »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #94
hoppp wrote: post #93

I should? what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent? As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss starting a sustainably monetizable project doesn't feel that realistic.

You can be your own AI provider.

>starting a sustainably monetizable project doesn't feel that realistic.

and

>You can be your own AI provider.

Not sure that being your own AI provider is "sustainably monetizable"?

Re: You should write an agent

#98

Post by mwcampbell »

tptacek wrote: post #56
zahlman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They know all the flags and are generally better at interpreting tool output than I am. In the toy example, you explicitly restrict the agent to supply just a `host`, and hard-code the rest of the command. Is the idea that you'd instead give a `description` something like "invoke the UNIX `ping` command", and a parameter described as constituting all the arguments to `ping`?

Honestly, I didn't think very hard about how to make `ping` do something interesting here, and in serious code I'd give it all the `ping` options (and also run it in a Fly Machine or Sprite where I don't have to bother checking to make sure none of those options gives code exec). It's possible the post would have been better had I done that; it might have come up with an even better test. I was telling a friend onlin…

What is Sprite in this context?

Re: You should write an agent

#99

Post by furyofantares »

hoppp wrote: post #93

I should? what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent? As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss starting a sustainably monetizable project doesn't feel that realistic.

> As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss

None of them are doing that.

They need funding because the next model has always been much more expensive to train than the profits of the previous model. And many do offer a lot of free usage which is of course operated at a loss. But I don't think any are operating inference at a loss, I think their margins are actually rather large.

Re: You should write an agent

#100

Post by hoppp »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #94
hoppp wrote: post #93

I should? what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent? As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss starting a sustainably monetizable project doesn't feel that realistic.

You can be your own AI provider.

For internal software maybe, but for a client facing service the incentives are not right when the norm is to operate at a loss.
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