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You should write an agent

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Re: You should write an agent

#181

Post by necovek »

furyofantares wrote: post #99
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.

Sounds quite a bit like pyramid scheme "business model": how is it different?

If a company stops training new models until they can fund it out of previous profits, do we only slow down or halt altogether? If they all do?

Re: You should write an agent

#182

Post by zb3 »

No, because I know that "agents" are token burning machines - for me they're less efficient than the chat interface, slower and burning much more tokens.

I'm not surprised that AI companies would want me to use them though.. I know what you're doing there :)

Re: You should write an agent

#183

Post by vinhnx »

dfex wrote: post #131
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

Good one! Sorry to disappoint you. But personally, that line strike deeply with me, honestly.

Re: You should write an agent

#184

Post by vinhnx »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #161
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…

It's conflating two issues though. Most people who can ride a bike can't explain the physics. They really don't know how it works. The bicycle lesson is about training the brain on a new task that cannot be taught in any other way. This case is more like a journeyman blacksmith who has to make his own tools before he can continue. In doing so, he gets tools of his own, but the real reward was learning what is require…

Agree, to me, the wheel is the greatest invention of all. Everyone could have rode a bike, but the underlying physic and motion that came to `riding` is a whole another story.

Re: You should write an agent

#186

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

tptacek wrote: post #23
riskable wrote: post #11

It'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'm not saying that the agent would do a better job than a good "hardcoded" human telemetry system, and we don't use agents for this stuff right now.

And that's why I won't touch 'em. All the agents will be abandoned when people realize their inherent flaws (security, reliability, truthfulness, etc) are not worth the constant low-grade uncertainty.

In a way it fits our times. Our leaders don't find truth to be a very useful notion. So we build systems that hallucinate and act unpredictably, and then invest all our money and infrastructure in them. Humans are weird.

Re: You should write an agent

#187

Post by ericd »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #155
ericd wrote: post #41

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 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 ag…

Agreed, and it's actually how I've been thinking about it, but it's also straight from the article, so can't claim credit. But it was fun to see it put into words by someone else.

And yeah, the LLM does so much of the lifting that the agent part is really surprisingly simple. It was really a revelation when I started working on mine.

Re: You should write an agent

#188

Post by AdieuToLogic »

mrkurt wrote: post #75
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…

Claude Code is an obfuscated javascript app. You can point Claude Code at it's own package and it will pretty reliably tell you how it works. I think Claude Code's magic is that Anthropic is happy to burn tokens. The loop itself is not all that interesting. What is interesting is how they manage the context window over a long chat. And I think a fair amount of that is serverside.

> Claude Code is an obfuscated javascript app. You can point Claude Code at it's own package and it will pretty reliably tell you how it works.

This is why I keep coming back to Hacker News. If the above is not a quintessential "hack", then I've never seen one.

Bravo!

Re: You should write an agent

#189

Post by rmoriz »

Side note: While the example uses GPT-5, the query interface is already some kind of industry standard. For example you could easily connect OpenRouter.ai and switch models and providers during runtime as needed. OpenRouter also has free models like some of the DeepSeek. While they are slow/rate limited and quantized, they are great for examples and playing around with it. https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&order=pricing-low-to-...

Re: You should write an agent

#190

Post by tptacek »

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

No, we are not an LLM provider.
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