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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#201

Post by agumonkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
agumonkey wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

true, there's often a point where your system becomes a blurry miracle

Re: You should write an agent

#202

Post by tptacek »

vkou wrote: post #33

> It’s Incredibly Easy client = OpenAI() context_good, context_bad = [{ "role": "system", "content": "you're Alph and you only tell the truth" }], [{ "role": "system", "content": "you're Ralph and you only tell lies" }] ... And this will work great until next week's update when Ralph responses will consist of "I'm sorry, it would be unethical for me to respond with lies, unless you pay for the Premium-Super-Deluxe su…

I love that the thing you singled out as not safe to run long term, because (apparently) of woke, was my weird deep-cut Labyrinth joke.

Re: You should write an agent

#203

Post by andai »

lukevp wrote: post #85
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’s a good staring point for getting into this? I don’t even know what Cerebras is. I just use GitHub copilot in VS Code. Is this local models?

Here is ChatGpt in 50 lines of Python:

https://gist.github.com/avelican/4fa1baaac403bc0af04f3a7f007...

No dependencies, and very easy to swap out for OpenRouter, Groq or any other API. (Except Anthropic and Google, they are special ;)

This also works on the frontend: pro tip you don't need a server for this stuff, you can make the requests directly from a HTML file. (Patent pending.)

Re: You should write an agent

#204

Post by andai »

foobarian wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot. Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D

Could you give some examples? I'm having the AI write the shell scripts, wondering if I'm missing out on some comfy UIs...

Re: You should write an agent

#205

Post by chubot »

jacquesm wrote: post #45
chubot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> language with well-defined semantics That would certainly be nice! That's why we have been overhauling shell with https://oils.pub , because shell can't be described as that right now It's in extremely poor shape e.g. some things found from building several thousand packages with OSH recently (decades of accumulated shell scripts) - bugs caused by the differing behavior of 'echo hi | read x; echo x=$x' in shells, i…

I love it how you went from 'Shell-WTFs' to 'let's fix this'. Kudos, most people get stuck at the first stage.

Thanks! We are down to 14 disagreements between OSH and busybox ash/bash on Alpine Linux main

https://op.oils.pub/aports-build/published.html

We also don't appear to be unreasonably far away from running ~~ "all shell scripts"

Now the problem after that will be motivating authors of foundational shell programs to maintain compatibility ... if that's even possible. (Often the authors are gone, and the nominal maintainers don't know shell.)

As I said, the state of affairs is pretty sorry and sad. Some of it I attribute to this phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17083976

Either way, YSH benefits from all this work

Re: You should write an agent

#206

Post by foobarian »

andai wrote: post #204
foobarian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot. Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D

Could you give some examples? I'm having the AI write the shell scripts, wondering if I'm missing out on some comfy UIs...

I was debugging a service that was spitting out a particular log line. I gave Copilot an example line, told it to write a script that tails the log line and serves a UI via port 8080 with a table of those log lines parsed and printed nicely. Then I iterated by adding filter buttons, aggregation stats, simple things like that. I asked it to add a "clear" button to reset the UI. I probably would not even have done this without an AI because the CLI equivalent would be parsing out and aggregating via some form of uniq -c | sort -n with a bunch of other tuning and it would be too much trouble.

Re: You should write an agent

#207

Post by efitz »

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.

Non sequitur.

If you are a software engineer, you are going to be expected to use AI in some form in the near future. A lot of AI in its current form is not intuitive. Ergo, spending a small effort on building an AI agent is a good way to develop the skills and intuition needed to be successful in some way.

Nobody is going to use a CPU you build, nor are you ever going to be expected to build one in the course of your work if you don’t seek out specific positions, nor is there much non-intuitive about commonly used CPU functionality, and in fact you don’t even use the CPU directly, you use translation software whit itself is fairly non-intuitive. But that’s ok too, you are unlikely to be asked to build a compiler unless you seek out those sorts of jobs.

EVERYONE involved in writing applications and services is going to use AI in the near future and in case you missed the last year, everyone IS building stuff with AI, mostly chat assistants that mostly suck because, much about building with AI is not intuitive.

Re: You should write an agent

#208

Post by hoppp »

tptacek wrote: post #191
hoppp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I assumed a service offering Virtual machines shares python code with the intent to get people to run that python on their infra.

Re: You should write an agent

#209

Post by IgorPartola »

z2 wrote: post #154
qwertygnu wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I have been playing with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Groq’s APIs in my spare time and if someone reading this doesn’t know it, they are doing the same thing and they are so close in implementation that it’s just dumb that they are in any way different.

You pass listing of messages generated by the user or the LLM or the developer to the API, it generates a part of the next message. That part may contain thinking blocks or tool calls (local function calling requested by the LLM). If so, you execute the tool calls and re-send the request. After the LLM has gathered all the info it returns the full message and says I am done. Sometimes the messages may contain content blocks that are not text but things like images, audio, etc.

That’s the API. That’s it. Now there are two improvements that are currently in the works:

1. Automatic local tool calling. This is seriously some sort of afterthought and not how they did it originally but ok, I guess this isn’t obvious to everyone.

2. Not having to send the entire message history back. OpenAI released a new feature where they store the history and you just send the ID of your last message. I can’t find how long they keep the message history. But they still fully support you managing the message history.

So we have an interface that does relatively few things, and that has basically a single sensible way to do it with some variations for flavor. And both OpenAI and Anthropic are engaged in a turf war over whose content block types are better. Just do the right thing and make your stuff compatible already.

Re: You should write an agent

#210

Post by tptacek »

hoppp wrote: post #208
tptacek wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I assumed a service offering Virtual machines shares python code with the intent to get people to run that python on their infra.

Yes. You've caught on to our devious plan. To do anything I suggested in this post, you'd have to use a computer. By spending compute cycles, you'd be driving scarcity of compute. By the inexorable law of supply and demand, this would drive the price of compute cycles up, allowing us to profit. We would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you.
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