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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#191

Post by tptacek »

hoppp wrote: post #157
vel0city wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You keep saying this, but there is nothing in this post about our service. I didn't use Fly.io at all to write this post. Across the thread, someone had to remind me that I could have.

Re: You should write an agent

#192

Post by tptacek »

hoppp wrote: post #176
johnfn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you repeatedly stating that the post is an ad as if it is some sort of dunk? Companies have blogs. Tech blogs often produce useful content. It is possible that an ad can both successfully promote the company and be useful to engineers. I find the Fly blog to be particularly well-written and thoughtful; it's taught me a good deal about Wireguard, for instance.

And that sounds fine, but Wireguard is not an overhyped industry promising huge gains in the future to investors and to developers jumping on a bandwagon who can find problems for this solution. I actually have built agents already in the past and this is my opinion. If you read the article the author says they want to hear the reasoning for disliking it, so this is mine, the only way to create a business is raising…

They're mentioning WireGuard because we do in fact do WireGuard, unlike LLM agents, which we do not offer as a service.

Re: You should write an agent

#193

Post by tptacek »

hoppp wrote: post #129
paulcole wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how programmers generally tout themselves as these tinkerers who love learning about and exploring technology… until it comes to AI and then it’s like “show me the profitable use case.” Just say you don’t like AI!

Yeah but fly.io is a cloud provider doing this advertisement with OpenAI Apis. Both cost money, so if it's not free to operate then the developed project should offset the costs. Its about balance. Really its the AI providers that have been promising unreal gains during this hype period, so people are more profit oriented.

What does "cloud provider" even have to do with this post?

Re: You should write an agent

#195

Post by lojack »

sprobertson wrote: post #147
hoppp wrote: post #122

Earlier 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

> software dev is a job for me that needs to generate income sir, this is a hackernews

> This post is a advertisement

same thing you said but in a different context... sir, this is a hackernews

Re: You should write an agent

#196

Post by furyofantares »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #164
furyofantares wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the game is inference the winners are the cloud mega scalers, not the ai labs.

This thread isn't about who wins, it's about the implication that it's too risky to build anything that depends on inference because AI companies are operating at a loss.

Re: You should write an agent

#197

Post by andai »

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…

What are you using for transcription?

I tried Whisper, but it's slow and not great.

I tried the gpt audio models, but they're trained to refuse to transcribe things.

I tried Google's models and they were terrible.

I ended up using one of Mistral's models, which is alright and very fast except sometimes it will respond to the text instead of transcribing it.

So I'll occasionally end up with pages of LLM rambling pasted instead of the words I said!

Re: You should write an agent

#198

Post by simonw »

necovek wrote: post #174
simonw wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am reading it as OpenAI selling them for 20% of the cost to serve them (serving at the equivalent token/s with cloud pay-per-use GPUs).

You're right, I misunderstood.

Re: You should write an agent

#199

Post by tptacek »

andai wrote: post #197
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…

What are you using for transcription? I tried Whisper, but it's slow and not great. I tried the gpt audio models, but they're trained to refuse to transcribe things. I tried Google's models and they were terrible. I ended up using one of Mistral's models, which is alright and very fast except sometimes it will respond to the text instead of transcribing it. So I'll occasionally end up with pages of LLM rambling paste…

I recently bought a mint-condition Alf phone, in the shape of Gordon Shumway of TV's "Alf", out of the back of an old auto shop in the south suburbs of Chicago, and naturally did the most obvious thing, which was to make a Gordon Shumway phone that has conversations in the voice of Gordon Shumway (sampled from Youtube and synthesized with ElevenLabs). I use https://github.com/etalab-ia/faster-whisper-server (I think?) as the Whisper backend. It's fine! Asterix feeds me WAV files, an ASI program feeds them to Whisper (running locally as a server) and does audio synthesis with the ElevenLabs API. Took like 2 hours.

Re: You should write an agent

#200

Post by tptacek »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #151

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?

Because you won't learn as much using an agent framework, and, as you can see from the post, you absolutely don't need one.
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