The Codex agent has an official TypeScript SDK now.
Why would Fly.io advocate using the vanilla GPT API to write an agent, instead of the official agent?
You should write an agent
151–160 of 409 posts
Re: You should write an agent
#152There 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.
One should be melting sand to get silicon, anything else it's too abstract to my taste.
Re: You should write an agent
#153It'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…
I hadn't given much thought to building agents, but the article and this comment are inspiring, thx. It's interesting to consider agents as a new kind of interface/function/broker within a system.
Re: You should write an agent
#154There 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.
It's good to go through the exercise, but agents are easy until you build a whole application using an API endpoint that OpenAI or LangChain decides to yank, and you spend the next week on a mini migration project. I don't disagree with the claim that MCP is reinventing the wheel but sometimes I'm happy plugging my tools and data into someone else's platform because they are spending orders of magnitudes more time than me doing the janitor work to keep up with whatever's trendy.
Re: You should write an agent
#155Absolutely, 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 no…
>build your own lightsaber
I think this is the best way of putting it I've heard to date. I started building one just to know what's happening under the hood when I use an off-the-shelf one, but it's actually so straightforward that now I'm adding features I want. I can add them faster than a whole team of developers on a "real" product can add them - because they have a bigger audience.
The other takeaway is that agents are fantastically simple.
Re: You should write an agent
#156There 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.
Given the premise, one could also say we nerds are forever happy.
Re: You should write an agent
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-stupi…
The submission is an advertisement for fly.io and OpenAI , both are paid services. We are commenting on an ad.
The person who wrote it did it for money. Fly.io operates for money, OpenAi charges for their API.
They posted it here expecting to find customers. This is a sales pitch.
At this point why is it an issue to expect a developer to make money on it?
As a dev, If the chain of monetization ends with me then there is no mainstream adoption whatsoever on the horizon.
I love to tinker but I do it for free not using paid services.
As for tinkering with agents, its a solution looking for a problem.
Re: You should write an agent
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When in doubt, there's always the option of rewriting an existing interactive shell in Rust.
Re: You should write an agent
#159Its easy to create a toy, but much harder to make something right! Like anything, so much weird polish stuff creeps in at the 90% mark.
Re: You should write an agent
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Also to be clear: are the schemas for the JSON data sent and parsed here specific to the model used? Or is there a standard? (Is that the P in MCP?)
Its JSON schema, well standardized, and predates LLMs: https://json-schema.org/