Reminds of this one [1] that I read half a year ago, which I used to develop my first agent. But what fly wrotes is definitely easier to understand, how I wish it was written a year earlier.
You should write an agent
331–340 of 409 posts
Re: You should write an agent
#332Earlier 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…
Meh, smart high-agency people can write good software, and they can go on to leverage powerful tools in productive ways.
All I see in your post is equivalent to something like: you're surrounded by boot camp coders who write the worst garbage you've ever seen, so now you have doubts for anyone who claims they've written some good shit. Psh, yeah right, you mean a mudball like everyone else?
In that scenario there isn't much a skilled software engineer with different experiences can interject because you've already made your decision, and your decision is based on experiences more visceral than anything they can add.
I do sympathize that you've grown impatient with the tools and the output of those around you instead of cracking that nut.
Re: You should write an agent
#333> I’m not even going to bother explaining what an agent is.
Does anyone actually know what exactly an agent is?
Re: You should write an agent
#334If you want to play with this stuff without spending a lot of money, what are your best options?
I love OpenRouter, since it is a simple way to get started and provides a wide range of available models.
You can buy credits and set usage limits for safe testing per API key to gain access from many AI models through one simple and unified API from all popular model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Z.AI, Qwen, ...)
Ten dollars is plenty to get started... experiments like in the post will cost you cents, not dollars.
Re: You should write an agent
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> catch you eventually if you try to extract and reuse access tokens What does that mean?
How do they know your requests come from Claude Code?
a million ways, but e.g: once in a while, add a "challenge" header; the next request should contain a "challenge-reply" header for said challenge. If you're just reusing the access token, you won't get it right.
Or: just have a convention/an algorithm to decide how quickly Claude should refresh the access token. If the server knows token should be refreshed after 1000 requests and notices refresh after 2000 requests, well, probably half of the requests were not made by Claude Code.
Re: You should write an agent
#336Do we need an agent? I get the point of this post: have fun building one because it's easy. But every time I see one of these takes, I keep wondering why do we encourage a tool that would potentially replace us. Why help it build better that could eventually take away what was fun and sustainable income-wise?
Re: You should write an agent
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You mean like a demo for simple stuff? Something like hello world type tasks? The small models you mentioned earlier are incapable of doing anything genuinely useful for daily use. The few tasks they can handle are easier and faster to just write yourself with the added assurance that no mistakes will be made.
I’d love to have small local models capable of running tools like current SOTA models, but the reality is that small models are still incapable, and hardly anyone has a machine powerful enough to run the 1 trillion parameter Kimi model.
Re: You should write an agent
#338> You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. I bet a majority of people who can ride a bicycle don't know how they steer, and would describe the physical movements they use to initiate and terminate a turn inaccurately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering
A Brief History of Bicycle Engineering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcRlDCsZM20
Re: You should write an agent
#339Do we need an agent? I get the point of this post: have fun building one because it's easy. But every time I see one of these takes, I keep wondering why do we encourage a tool that would potentially replace us. Why help it build better that could eventually take away what was fun and sustainable income-wise?
Interesting to think that this question could have been asked of almost all software work up until this point, except the "us" was always "someone else "
Re: You should write an agent
#340Do we need an agent? I get the point of this post: have fun building one because it's easy. But every time I see one of these takes, I keep wondering why do we encourage a tool that would potentially replace us. Why help it build better that could eventually take away what was fun and sustainable income-wise?
Easy answer: so you can more sharply criticize them, rather than falling into the rhetorical traps of people who don't understand how they work well enough to sound credible. It's so little effort to get to that point!