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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#381

Post by dave1010uk »

simonw wrote: post #133
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…

I love hubcap so much. It was a real eye-opener for me at the time, really impressive result for so little code. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/6/hubcap/

Thanks Simon!

It only worked because of your LLM tool. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Re: You should write an agent

#382

Post by tptacek »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #149
simonw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "insane to not believe in vibe coding" is a fair summary of https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ - that post wasn't about vibe coding (at least by its I-think-correct definition of prompt-driven coding where you don't pay any attention to the code that's being written), it was about AI-assisted engineering by professional software developers. It did have some swear words in - as did many of the previous…

Worth highlighting that both OP article and the one Simon linked are by @tptacek, who is also one of the top commenters here on HN. His fly.io posts are very much in his style. I figure they let him post there, without corp-washing, because any publicity is good publicity.

This is the corp-washed version of this post.

Re: You should write an agent

#383

Post by andai »

richardlblair wrote: post #364
andai wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for transcription? I tried Whisper, but it's slow and not great. I tried the gpt audio models, but they're trained to refuse to transcribe things. I tried Google's models and they were terrible. I ended up using one of Mistral's models, which is alright and very fast except sometimes it will respond to the text instead of transcribing it. So I'll occasionally end up with pages of LLM rambling paste…

The new Qwen model is supposed to be very good. Honestly, I've gotten really far simply by transcribing audio with whisper, having a cheap model clean up the output to make it make sense (especially in a coding context), and copying the result to the clipboard. My goal is less about speed and more about not touching the keyboard, though.

Thanks. Could you share more? I'm about to reinvent this wheel right now. (Add a bunch of manual find-replace strings to my setup...)

Here's my current setup:

vt.py (mine) - voice type - uses pyqt to make a status icon and use global hotkeys for start/stop/cancel recording. Formerly used 3rd party APIs, now uses parakeet_py (patent pending).

parakeet_py (mine): A Python binding for transcribe-rs, which is what Handy (see below) uses internally (just a wrapper for Parakeet V3). Claude Code made this one.

(Previously I was using voxtral-small-latest (Mistral API), which is very good except that sometimes it will output its own answer to my question instead of transcribing it.)

In other words, I'm running Parakeet V3 on my CPU, on a ten year old laptop, and it works great. I just have it set up in a slightly convoluted way...

I didn't expect the "generate me some rust bindings" thing to work, or I would have probably gone with a simpler option! (Unexpected downside of Claude is really smart: you end up with a Rube Goldberg machine to maintain!)

For the record, Handy - https://github.com/cjpais/Handy/issues - does 80% of what I want. Gives a nice UI for Parakeet. But I didn't like the hotkey design, didn't like the lack of flexibility for autocorrect etc... already had the muscle memory from my vt.py ;)

Re: You should write an agent

#384

Post by recursive »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #361
recursive wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A silly scenario. LLMs don’t have independent will. They are action / response. If home robot assistants become feasible, they would have similar limitations

I don't understand this. Perhaps murder requires intent? I'll use the word "kill" then.

Re: You should write an agent

#385

Post by a-dub »

indeyets wrote: post #283
a-dub wrote: post #92

they kinda feel like the cgi perl scripts of the mid 2020s.

You mean late 1990’s? :)

no i mean, back in the 90's cgi perl scripts were the easy it thing for interacting with the big tech wave and now in the mid-2020s llm python agent scripts with tool extensions are the easy it thing for interacting with the big tech wave.

Re: You should write an agent

#386

Post by nylonstrung »

sumedh wrote: post #235
behnamoh wrote: post #6

> nobody knows anything yet that sums up my experience in AI over the past three years. so many projects reinvent the same thing, so much spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks, so much excitement followed by disappointment when a new model drops, so many people grifting, and so many hacks and workarounds like RAG with no evidence of them actually working other than "trust me bro" and trial and error.

That is because for the people for whom AI is actually working/making money they would prefer to keep it a secret on what and how they are doing it, why attract competition?

Who would you say it's working for?

What products or companies are the gold standard of agent implementation right now?

Re: You should write an agent

#387

Post by nylonstrung »

simonw wrote: post #150
threecheese wrote: post #57

Does anyone have an understanding - or intuition - of what the agentic loop looks like in the popular coding agents? Is it purely a “while 1: call_llm(system, assistant)”, or is there complex orchestration? I’m trying to understand if the value for Claude Code (for example) is purely in Sonnet/Haiku + the tool system prompt, or if there’s more secret sauce - beyond the “sugar” of instruction file inclusion via comman…

You can reverse engineer Claude Code by intercepting its HTTP traffic. It's pretty fascinating - there are a bunch of ways to do this, I use this one: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/2/claude-trace/

Wow it seems almost designed to burn through tokens.

I wish we had a version that was optimized around token/cost efficiency

Re: You should write an agent

#388

Post by khazhoux »

Agree 100% with premise of the article. I feel like the big secret of the recent advances in LLM tooling is that these are all just variations of “send a chat request and process the output.” Even Tool Calling is just wrapping one chat request with another hidden one that is asking which of N tools applies and what the parameters should be. RAG is simply pre-loading a bunch of extra text into the chat request, etc.

My main point being, though: for anyone intimidated by the recent tooling advances… you can most definitely do all this yourself.

Re: You should write an agent

#389

Post by psychoslave »

tptacek wrote: post #379
psychoslave wrote: post #244

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."

You're going to have to explain that analogy to me, sorry.

Sure, phone call to plumber is remote call to turn key API, and manager layer is MVP. Hope that makes it more clear.

Re: You should write an agent

#390

Post by MinimalAction »

richardlblair wrote: post #365
MinimalAction wrote: post #336

Do 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?

I've been building tools for stuff I don't want to do. Any task where I need to take some amount of data, structured or unstructured, and need a specific outcome is perfect. That way I can spend more time on the thing I do want to do (including building these little tools).

I appreciate this thinking. This gives me the vibes of "let me draw, paint, sing for fun, while AI takes care of my chores". I agree with that, but I can’t help but wonder if the agent ever considers whether things you enjoy should be left to you, but takes everything it can.
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