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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#221

Post by simonw »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #186
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…

> 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 ve…

Some of us have been happily using agentic coding tools (Claude Code etc) since February and we're still not abandoning them for their inherent flaws.

Re: You should write an agent

#222

Post by zahlman »

spenczar5 wrote: post #160
zahlman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Ah, so I can specify how I want it to describe the tool request? And it's been trained to just accommodate that?

Re: You should write an agent

#224

Post by monarchwadia »

dave1010uk wrote: post #80

Two years ago I wrote an agent in 25 lines of PHP [0]. It was surprisingly effective, even back then before tool calling was a thing and you had to coax the LLM into returning structured output. I think it even worked with GPT-3.5 for trivial things. In my mind LLMs are just UNIX strong manipulation tools like `sed` or `awk`: you give them an input and command and they give you an output. This is especially true if y…

[dead]

Re: You should write an agent

#225

Post by crystal_revenge »

simonw wrote: post #221
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ve…

Some of us have been happily using agentic coding tools (Claude Code etc) since February and we're still not abandoning them for their inherent flaws.

The problem with statements like these is that I work with people who make the same claims, but are slowly building useless, buggy monstrosities that for various reasons nobody can/will call out.

Obviously I’m reasonably willing to believe that you are an exception. However every person I’ve interacted with who makes this same claim has presented me with a dumpster fire and expected me to marvel at it.

Re: You should write an agent

#226

Post by furyofantares »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #171
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.

> and hardware just vanish. Okay, this tells me you really don't understand model serving or any of the details of infrastructure. The hardware is incredibly ephemeral . Your home GPU might last a few years (and I'm starting to doubt that you've even trained a model at home), but these GPUs have incredibly short lifespans under load for production use. Even if you're not working on the back end of these models, you s…

I didn't address the comment about how some startups are operating at a loss because it seems like an irrelevant nitpick at my wording that "none of them" is operating inference at a loss. I don't think the comment I was replying to was referring to relying on whatever startups you're talking about. I think they were referring to Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI - and so was I.

That seems like a theme with these replies, nitpicking a minor thing or ignoring the context or both, or I guess more generously I could blame myself of not being more precise with my wording. But sure, you have to buy new GPUs after making a bunch of money burning the ones you have down.

I think your point about knowledge cutoff is interesting, and I don't know what the ongoing cost to keeping a model up to date with world knowledge is. Most of the agents I think about personally don't actually want world knowledge and have to be prompted or fine tuned such that they won't use it. So I think that requirement kind of slipped my mind.

Re: You should write an agent

#227

Post by simonw »

zahlman wrote: post #222
spenczar5 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its JSON schema, well standardized, and predates LLMs: https://json-schema.org/

Ah, so I can specify how I want it to describe the tool request? And it's been trained to just accommodate that?

Most LLMs have tool patterns trained into them now, which are then managed for you by the API that the developers run on top of the models.

But... you don't have to use that at all. You can use pure prompting with ANY good LLM to get your own custom version of tool calling:

  Any time you want to run a calculation, reply with:
  {{CALCULATOR: 3 + 5 + 6}}
  Then STOP. I will reply with the result.
Before LLMs had tool calling we called this the ReAct pattern - I wrote up an example of implementing that in March 2023 here: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern

Re: You should write an agent

#228

Post by simonw »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #225
simonw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us have been happily using agentic coding tools (Claude Code etc) since February and we're still not abandoning them for their inherent flaws.

The problem with statements like these is that I work with people who make the same claims, but are slowly building useless, buggy monstrosities that for various reasons nobody can/will call out. Obviously I’m reasonably willing to believe that you are an exception. However every person I’ve interacted with who makes this same claim has presented me with a dumpster fire and expected me to marvel at it.

I'm not going to dispute your own experience with people who aren't using this stuff effectively, but the great thing about the internet is that you can use it to track the people who are making the very best use of any piece of technology.

Re: You should write an agent

#229

Post by cyberpunk »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #225
simonw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us have been happily using agentic coding tools (Claude Code etc) since February and we're still not abandoning them for their inherent flaws.

The problem with statements like these is that I work with people who make the same claims, but are slowly building useless, buggy monstrosities that for various reasons nobody can/will call out. Obviously I’m reasonably willing to believe that you are an exception. However every person I’ve interacted with who makes this same claim has presented me with a dumpster fire and expected me to marvel at it.

We have gpt-5 and gemini 2.5 pro at work, and both of them produce huge amounts of basically shit code that doesn’t work.

Every time i reach for them recently I end up spending more time refactoring the bad code out or in deep hostage negotiations with the chatbot of the day that I would have been faster writing it myself.

That and for some reason they occasionally make me really angry.

Oh a bunch of prompts in and then it hallucinated some library a dependency isn’t even using and spews a 200 line diff at me, again, great.

Although at least i can swear at them and get them to write me little apology poems..

Re: You should write an agent

#230

Post by sumedh »

Uehreka wrote: post #218
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…

The reason a lot of people don’t do this is because Claude Code lets you use a Claude Max subscription to get virtually unlimited tokens. If you’re using this stuff for your job, Claude Max ends up being like 10x the value of paying by the token, it’s basically mandatory. And you can’t use your Claude Max subscription for tools other than Claude Code (for TOS reasons. And they’ll likely catch you eventually if you tr…

> catch you eventually if you try to extract and reuse access tokens

What does that mean?

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