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You should write an agent

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Re: You should write an agent

#351

Post by tptacek »

indigodaddy wrote: post #350
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…

Or have the agent strace a process and describe what's going on as if you're a 5 year old (because I actually need that to understand strace output)

Iterated strace runs are also interesting because they generate large amounts of data, which means you actually have to do context programming.

Re: You should write an agent

#352

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: You should write an agent

#353

Post by smohare »

andy99 wrote: post #313
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

LLMs are good at fuzzy pattern matching and data manipulation. The upstream comment comparing to awk is very apt. Instead of having to write a regex to match some condition you instruct an LLM and get more flexibility. This includes deciding what the next action to take is in the agent loop. But there is no reason (and lots of downside) to leave anything to the LLM that’s not “fuzzy” and you could just write determin…

[dead]

Re: You should write an agent

#354

Post by criddell »

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.

> Personally I’d absolutely buy an LLM in a box

In a box? I want one in a unit with arms and legs and cameras and microphones so I can have it do useful things for me around my home.

Re: You should write an agent

#355

Post by alach11 »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #108
furyofantares wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as every AI provider is operating at a loss None of them are doing that. They need funding because the next model has always been much more expensive to train than the profits of the previous model. And many do offer a lot of free usage which is of course operated at a loss. But I don't think any are operating inference at a loss, I think their margins are actually rather large.

So AI companies are profitable when you ignore some of the things they have to spend money on to operate? Snark aside, inference is still being done at a loss. Anthropic, the most profitable AI vendor, is operating at a roughly -140% margin. xAI is the worst at somewhere around -3,600% margin.

Can you cite your source for inference being at a loss? This disagrees with most of what I've read.

Re: You should write an agent

#356

Post by AlecSchueler »

DrewADesign wrote: post #344
AlecSchueler wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "

It’s generally been true, but not close to the scale we’re looking at now. The implied/assumed hypocrisy also doesn’t stop it from it sucking, or make it immune to criticism.

Indeed it probably sucks even more in a "you reap what you sow" kind of way :(

Re: You should write an agent

#358

Post by unshavedyak »

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…

Is using CC outside of the CC binary even needed? CC has a SDK, could you not just use the proper binary? I've debated using it as the backend for internal chat bots and whatnot unrelated to "coding". Though maybe that's against the TOS as i'm not using CC in the spirit of it's design?

Re: You should write an agent

#359

Post by recursive »

criddell wrote: post #354
baq wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Personally I’d absolutely buy an LLM in a box In a box? I want one in a unit with arms and legs and cameras and microphones so I can have it do useful things for me around my home.

You're an optimist I see. I wouldn't allow that in my house until I have some kind of strong and comprehensible evidence that it won't murder me in my sleep.

Re: You should write an agent

#360

Post by oooyay »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #276
oooyay wrote: post #7

Heh, the bit about context engineering is palpable. I'm writing a personal assistant which, imo, is distinct from an agent in that it has a lot of capabilities a regular agent wouldn't necessarily need such as memory, task tracking, broad solutioning capabilities, etc... I ended up writing agents that talk to other agents which have MCP prompts, resources, and tools to guide them as general problem solvers. The first…

https://github.com/mem0ai/mem0?tab=readme-ov-file Is this useful for you?

Could be! I'll give it a shot
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