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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#141

Post by vel0city »

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

Practically everything is something you will need to pay for in the end. You probably spent money on an internet connection, electricity, and computing equipment to write this comment. Are you intending to make a profit from commenting here?

You don't need to run something like this against a paid API provider. You could easily rework this to run against a local agent hosted on hardware you own. A number of not-stupid-expensive consumer GPUs can run some smaller models locally at home for not a lot of money. You can even play videogames with those cards after.

Get this: sometimes people write code and tinker with things for fun. Crazy, I know.

Re: You should write an agent

#142

Post by simonw »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #108
furyofantares wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So AI companies are profitable when you ignore some of the things they have to spend money on to operate? Snark aside, inference is still being done at a loss. Anthropic, the most profitable AI vendor, is operating at a roughly -140% margin. xAI is the worst at somewhere around -3,600% margin.

The interesting companies to look at here are the ones that sell inference against open weight models that were trained by other companies - Fireworks, Cloudflare, DeepInfra, Together AI etc.

They need to cover their serving costs but are not spending money on training models. Are they profitable? Probably not yet, because they're investing a lot of cash in competing with each other to R&D more efficient ways of serving etc, but they're a lot closer to profitability than the labs that are spending millions of dollars on training runs.

Re: You should write an agent

#143

Post by simonw »

hoppp wrote: post #105
furyofantares wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When comparing the cost of an H100 GPU per hour and calculating cost of tokens, it seems the OpenAI offering for the latest model is 5 times cheaper than renting the hardware. OpenAI balance sheet also shows an $11 billion loss . I can't see any profit on anything they create. The product is good but it relies on investors fueling the AI bubble.

> When comparing the cost of an H100 GPU per hour and calculating cost of tokens, it seems the OpenAI offering for the latest model is 5 times cheaper than renting the hardware.

How did you come to that conclusion? That would be a very notable result if it did turn out OpenAI were selling tokens for 5x the cost it took to serve them.

Re: You should write an agent

#144

Post by qwertygnu »

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.

Very early in TFA it explains how easy it is to do. That's the whole point of the post.

Re: You should write an agent

#145

Post by vel0city »

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…

The models may be somewhat frozen in time but with the right tools available to it they don't need all information innately coded into it. If they're able to query for reliable information to drag in they can talk about things that are well outside their original training data.

Re: You should write an agent

#146

Post by simonw »

throwaway8xak92 wrote: post #115

[flagged]

I don't think "insane to not believe in vibe coding" is a fair summary of https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ - that post wasn't about vibe coding (at least by its I-think-correct definition of prompt-driven coding where you don't pay any attention to the code that's being written), it was about AI-assisted engineering by professional software developers.

It did have some swear words in - as did many of the previous posts on the Fly.io corporate blog.

Re: You should write an agent

#147

Post by sprobertson »

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

> software dev is a job for me that needs to generate income

sir, this is a hackernews

Re: You should write an agent

#148

Post by simonw »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #101

Question, how hard is it for someone new to agents to dip their toes into writing a simple agent to get data? (e.g., getting reviews from sites for sentiment analysis?) Forgive if I get someting wrong: From what I see, it seems fundamentally it is a LLM being ran each loop with information about tools provided to it. On each loop the LLM evaluates inputs/context (from tool calls, inputs, etc.) and decided which tool…

You can prototype this without writing any code at all.

Fire up "claude --dangerously-skip-permissions" in a fresh directory (ideally in a Docker container if you want to limit the chance of it breaking anything else) and prompt this:

> Use Playwright to fetch ten reviews from http://www.example.com/ then run sentiment analysis on them and write the results out as JSON files. Install any missing dependencies.

Watch what it does. Be careful not to let it spider the site in a way that would justifiably upset the site owners.

Re: You should write an agent

#149

Post by AceJohnny2 »

simonw wrote: post #146
throwaway8xak92 wrote: post #115

[flagged]

I don't think "insane to not believe in vibe coding" is a fair summary of https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ - that post wasn't about vibe coding (at least by its I-think-correct definition of prompt-driven coding where you don't pay any attention to the code that's being written), it was about AI-assisted engineering by professional software developers. It did have some swear words in - as did many of the previous…

Worth highlighting that both OP article and the one Simon linked are by @tptacek, who is also one of the top commenters here on HN.

His fly.io posts are very much in his style. I figure they let him post there, without corp-washing, because any publicity is good publicity.

Re: You should write an agent

#150

Post by simonw »

threecheese wrote: post #57

Does anyone have an understanding - or intuition - of what the agentic loop looks like in the popular coding agents? Is it purely a “while 1: call_llm(system, assistant)”, or is there complex orchestration? I’m trying to understand if the value for Claude Code (for example) is purely in Sonnet/Haiku + the tool system prompt, or if there’s more secret sauce - beyond the “sugar” of instruction file inclusion via comman…

You can reverse engineer Claude Code by intercepting its HTTP traffic. It's pretty fascinating - there are a bunch of ways to do this, I use this one: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/2/claude-trace/
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