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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#131

Post by dfex »

vinhnx wrote: post #112

> “You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.” This resonates deeply with me. That's why I built one myself [0], I really really love to truly understand how coding agents work. The learning has been immense for me, I now have working knowledge of ANSI escape codes, grapheme clusters, terminal emulators, Unicode normalization, VT protocols, PTY sessions, and filesystem operations…

>> “You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.”

> This resonates deeply with me. That's why I built one myself [0]

I was hoping to see a home-made bike at that link.. Came away disappointed

Re: You should write an agent

#132

Post by jacquesm »

agumonkey wrote: post #104
jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's highly plausible that all we assumed was good design / engineering will disappear if LLMs/Agents can produce more without having the be modular. (sadly)

There is some kind of parallel behind 'AI' and 'Fuzzy Logic'. Fuzzy logic to me always appeared like a large number of patches to get enough coverage for a system to work even if you didn't understand it. AI just increases the number of patches to billions.

Re: You should write an agent

#133

Post by simonw »

dave1010uk wrote: post #80

Two years ago I wrote an agent in 25 lines of PHP [0]. It was surprisingly effective, even back then before tool calling was a thing and you had to coax the LLM into returning structured output. I think it even worked with GPT-3.5 for trivial things. In my mind LLMs are just UNIX strong manipulation tools like `sed` or `awk`: you give them an input and command and they give you an output. This is especially true if y…

I love hubcap so much. It was a real eye-opener for me at the time, really impressive result for so little code. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/6/hubcap/

Re: You should write an agent

#134

Post by furyofantares »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #124
furyofantares wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parent comment never said operating inference at a loss Context. Whether inference is profitable at current prices is what informs how risky it is to build a product that depends on buying inference, which is what the post was about.

So you're assuming there's a world where these companies exist solely by providing inference? The first obvious limitation of this would be that all models would be frozen in time. These companies are operating at an insane loss and a major part of that loss is required to continue existing. It's not realistic to imagine that there is an "inference" only future for these large AI companies. And again, there are many…

> So you're assuming there's a world where these companies exist solely by providing inference?

Yes, obviously? There is no world where the models and hardware just vanish.

Re: You should write an agent

#135

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

Show me where TFA even implied that you should start a sustainably monetizable project with agents?

Re: You should write an agent

#136

Post by captainkrtek »

Zak wrote: post #78

> You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. I bet a majority of people who can ride a bicycle don't know how they steer, and would describe the physical movements they use to initiate and terminate a turn inaccurately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering

Relevant interesting tangent:

“Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac

Re: You should write an agent

#137

Post by simonw »

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.

> what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent?

The problem that you might not intuitively understand how agents work and what they are and aren't capable of - at least not as well as you would understand it if you spent half an hour building one for yourself.

Re: You should write an agent

#138

Post by coffeecoders »

hshdhdhehd wrote: post #114

There is a lot of stuff I should do. From making my own CPU from a breadboard of nand gates to building a CDN in Rust. But aint got time for all the things. That said I built an LLM following Karpathy's tutorial. So I think it aims good to dabble a bit.

Yeah, it’s a never-ending curve.

I built an 8-bit computer on breadboards once, then went down the rabbit hole of flight training for a PPL. Every time I think I’m "done," the finish line moves a few miles further.

Guess we nerds are never happy.

Re: You should write an agent

#139

Post by simonw »

hoppp wrote: post #122
johnfn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post is just about playing around with the tech for fun. Why does monetization come into it? It feels like saying you don't want to use Python because Astral, the company that makes uv, is operating at a loss. What?

Agents use Apis that I will need to pay for and generally software dev is a job for me that needs to generate income. If the Apis I call are not profitable for the provider then they won't be for me either. This post is a fly.io advertisement

"Agents use Apis that I will need to pay for"

Not if you run them against local models, which are free to download and free to run. The Qwen 3 4B models only need a couple of GBs of available RAM and will run happily on CPU as opposed to GPU. Cost isn't a reason not to explore this stuff.

Re: You should write an agent

#140

Post by aidenn0 »

awayto wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

blacklist is going to be a bad idea since so many commands can be made to run other commands with their arguments.
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