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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#241

Post by veryemartguy »

simonw wrote: post #137
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.

> what problems can I solve, that can be only done with an agent? The problem that you might not intuitively understand how agents work and what they are and aren't capable of - at least not as well as you would understand it if you spent half an hour building one for yourself.

Seems like it would be a lot easier for everyone if we knew the answer to his/her question.

Re: You should write an agent

#242

Post by veryemartguy »

paulcole wrote: post #117
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.

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!

Or maybe some of us realize that these tools are fucking useless and don’t offer any “value” apart from the most basic thing imaginable.

And I use value in quotes because as soon as the AI providers suddenly need to start generating a profit, that “value” is going to cost more than your salary.

Re: You should write an agent

#243

Post by cyberpunk »

simonw wrote: post #234
cyberpunk wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Are you using them via a coding agent harness such as Codex CLI or Gemini CLI?

Via the jetbrains plugin, has an 'agent' mode and can edit files and call tools so on, yes I setup MCP integrations and so on also. Still kinda sucks. shrug.

I keep flipping between this is the end of our careers, to I'm totally safe. So far this is the longest 'totally safe' period I've had since GPT-2 or so came along..

Re: You should write an agent

#244

Post by psychoslave »

It really reads to me like, "you should build a running water circuit", then presenting you how easy it is to phone a plumber and let them free ride on the matter, but beware to not use a project manager as real people implement project management of plumbery themselves."

Re: You should write an agent

#245

Post by sumedh »

simonw wrote: post #238
sumedh wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont you need to setup Playwright MCP first?

No. I don't use Playwright MCP at all - if the coding agent can run Python code it can use the Playwright Python library directly, if Node.js it can use the Playwright Node library.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

I wanted to run claude headlessly (-p) and playwright headlessly to get some content. I was using Playwright MCP and for some reason claude in headless mode could not open playwright MCP in headless mode.

I never realized i can just use playwright directly without the playwright MCP before your comment. Thanks once again.

Re: You should write an agent

#246

Post by singularity2001 »

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…

what's the point of specialized agents when you just have one universal agent that can do anything e.g. Claude

Re: You should write an agent

#248

Post by robot-wrangler »

simonw wrote: post #139
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

"Agents use Apis that I will need to pay for" Not if you run them against local models, which are free to download and free to run. The Qwen 3 4B models only need a couple of GBs of available RAM and will run happily on CPU as opposed to GPU. Cost isn't a reason not to explore this stuff.

> Not if you run them against local models, which are free to download and free to run .. run happily on CPU .. Cost isn't a reason not to explore this stuff.

Let's be realistic and not over-promise. Conversational slop and coding factorial will work. But the local experience for coding agents, tool-calling, and reasoning is still very bad until/unless you have a pretty expensive workstation. CPU and qwen 4b will be disappointing to even try experiments on. The only useful thing most people can realistically do locally is fuzzy search with simple RAG. Besides factorial, maybe some other stuff that's in the training set, like help with simple shell commands. (Great for people who are new to unix, but won't help the veteran dev who is trying to convince themselves AI is real or figuring out how to get it into their workflows)

Anyway, admitting that AI is still very much in a "pay to play" phase is actually ok. More measured stances, fewer reflexive detractors or boosters

Re: You should write an agent

#250

Post by techpression »

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.

I abandoned Claude Code pretty quickly, I find generic tools give generic answers, but since I do Elixir I’m ”blessed” with Tidewave which gives a much better experience. I hope more people get to experience framework built tooling instead of just generic stuff.

It still wants to build an airplane to go out with the trash sometimes and will happily tell you wrong is right. However I much prefer it trying to figure it out by reading logs, schemas and do browser analysis automatically than me feeding logs etc manually.

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