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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#281

Post by simonw »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #271
simonw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I was being misleading here. https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/ is a tutorial about writing a simple "agent" - aka a thing that uses an LLM to call tools in a loop - that can make a simple tool call. The complaint I was responding to here was that there's no point trying this if you don't want to be hooked on expensive APIs. I think this is one of the areas where the existence of tiny but capa…

I think it is misleading to suggest today that tool-calling for nontrivial stuff really works with local models. It just works in demos because those tools always accept one or two arguments, usually string literals or numbers. In the real world functions take more complex arguments, many arguments, or take a single argument that's an object with multiple attributes, etc. You can begin to work around this stuff by pa…

You and I clearly have a different idea of what "very very simple stuff" involves.

Even the small models are very capable of stringing together a short sequence of simple tool calls these days - and if you have 32GB of RAM (eg a ~$1500 laptop) you can run models like gpt-oss:20b which are capable of operating tools like bash in a reasonably useful way.

This wasn't true even six months ago - the local models released in 2025 have almost all had tool calling specially trained into them.

Re: You should write an agent

#282

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

I agree with you mostly.

On the other hand, I think that show or it didn’t happen is essential.

Dumping a bit of code into an LLM doesn’t make it a code agent.

And what Magic? I think you never hit conceptual and structural problems. Context window? History? Good or bad? Large Scale changes or small refactoring here and there? Sample size one or several teams? What app? How many components? Green field or not? Which programming language?

I bet you will color Claude and especially GitHub Copilot a bit differently, given that you can easily kill any self made Code Agent quite easily with a bit of steam.

Code Agents are incredibly hard to build and use. Vibe Coding is dead for a reason. I remember vividly the inflation of Todo apps and JS frameworks (Ember, Backbone, Knockout are survivors) years ago.

The more you know about agents and especially code agents the more you know, why engineers won’t be replaced so fast - Senior Engineers who hone their craft.

I enjoy fiddling with experimental agent implementations, but value certain frameworks. They solved in an opiated way problems you will run into if you dig deeper and others depend on you.

Re: You should write an agent

#284

Post by techpression »

DeathArrow wrote: post #266
techpression wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Cursor can read logs and schemas and use curl to test API responses. It can also look into the database.

But then you have to use Cursor. Tidewave runs as a dependency in the framework and you just navigate to a url, it’s quite refreshing actually.

Re: You should write an agent

#285

Post by ay »

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…

Kimi is noticeably better at tool calling than gpt-oss-120b.

I made a fun toy agent where the two models are shoulder surfing each other and swap the turns (either voluntarily, during a summarization phase), or forcefully if a tool calling mistake is made, and Kimi ends up running the show much much more often than gpt-oss.

And yes - it is very much fun to build those!

Re: You should write an agent

#286

Post by Uehreka »

sumedh wrote: post #230
Uehreka wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m saying if you try to use Wireshark or something to grab the session token Claude Code is using and pass it to another tool so that tool can use the same session token, they’ll probably eventually find out. All it would take is having Claude Code start passing an extra header that your other tool doesn’t know about yet, suspend any accounts whose session token is used in requests that don’t have that header and manually deal with any false positives. (If you’re thinking of replying with a workaround: That was just one example, there are a bajillion ways they can figure people out if they want to)

Re: You should write an agent

#287

Post by gartdavis »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #239
simonw wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This line of reasoning is smelling pretty "no true Scotsman" to me. I'm sure there were amazing ColdFusion devs, but that hardly justifies the use of the technology. Likewise "This tool works great on the condition that you need to hire a Simon Willison level dev" is almost a fault. I'm pretty confident you could squeeze some juice out of a Markov Chain (ignoring, of course, that decoder-only LLMs are basically fancy…

"elaborate foot guns" -- HN is a high signal environment, but I could read for a week and not find a gem like this. Props.

Destiny visits me on my 18th birthday and says, "Gart, your mediocrity will result in a long series of elaborate foot guns. Be humble. You are warned."

Re: You should write an agent

#288

Post by cess11 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I didn't think very hard about how to make `ping` do something interesting here, and in serious code I'd give it all the `ping` options (and also run it in a Fly Machine or Sprite where I don't have to bother checking to make sure none of those options gives code exec). It's possible the post would have been better had I done that; it might have come up with an even better test. I was telling a friend onlin…

What is Sprite in this context?

I'm guessing the Fly Machine they're referring to is a container running on fly.io, perhaps the sprite is what the Spritely Institute calls a goblin.

Re: You should write an agent

#289

Post by throwaway4012 »

baq wrote: post #253
singularity2001 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you can get a specialized agent to work in its domain at 10% parameters of a foundation model, you can feasibly run locally, which opens up e.g. offline use cases. Personally I’d absolutely buy an LLM in a box which I could connect to my home assistant via usb.

Can you (or someone else) explain how to do that? How much does it typically cost to create a specialized agents that uses a local model? I thought it was expensive?

Re: You should write an agent

#290

Post by meeq »

DeathArrow wrote: post #258
anonym29 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cerebras now has glm 4.6. Still obscenely fast, and now obscenely smart, too.

Aren't there cheaper providers of GLM 4.6 on Openrouter? What are the advantages of using Cerebras? Is it much faster?

You know how sometimes when you send a prompt to Claude, you just know it’s gonna take a while, so you go grab a coffee, come back, and it’s still working? With Cerebras it’s not even worth switching tabs, because it’ll finish the same task in like three seconds.
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