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Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

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Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#11
What's the advantage in putting agents in the persistence layer rather than the application layer? This seems to me strictly less flexible, scalable, secure, easy to work with... I am having a hard time imagining why I would want to integrate with APIs or write an agentic harness in the database rather than in application code?

Maybe I'm behind the times but I don't understand.

Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#13
post #5

This... does not seem like separation of concerns. Not to mention that the data layer seems like the one where you want to keep things most deterministic.

To decouple this the person would have to broadcast nearly every event and rebuild the observer layers elsewhere.

Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#14
post #8

It feels like we're a week away from the Claw hype supplanting AI hype. Companies will start renaming things ClawX to get on the hype bandwagon.

I think "claw" isn't appealing enough to be genericized and that "agent" will continue to be the generic term, but we'll see.

Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#16
post #11

What's the advantage in putting agents in the persistence layer rather than the application layer? This seems to me strictly less flexible, scalable, secure, easy to work with... I am having a hard time imagining why I would want to integrate with APIs or write an agentic harness in the database rather than in application code? Maybe I'm behind the times but I don't understand.

It's similar to when we wrote all our business logic in eg pl/sql, stored procedures etc. Seems attractive at first, but it breaks separation of concerns, becomes difficult to test etc.

Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#19
post #15
post #2

This is mind-bending. I can't imagine that it performs well enough to be particularly fit for production just yet but..... wow.

how exactly is adding a stored procedure as an agent mind bending

I can only speak for my own mind ;) but the most advanced thing I'd seen prior in this regard was Google Sheets' =AI function, which is pretty convenient (if awkward) when you want to map values to LLM output.

What I specifically found "mind-bending" about this is that I don't have a clear concept of the limits of what an agent can do. In the limit case, it's basically like an independent employee, right?. So the concept of having a dedicated person sitting on each row of my database and transactionally performing any task I can describe is ... well, it IS a bit boggling to me.

Another way to look at it is: this is an extremely powerful construct for managing fleets of agents. I trust Postgres to execute all the stored procedures I ask it to. So with this tool I can easily spin up arbitrarily many agents. And state management is very simple, because they can directly edit their associated row!

IDK, the more I think about it the more fascinated I am. I'm sure there is some open source SAAS or something that has similar semantics and can do all this more efficiently, but now I know that this is a category of thing one could potentially build/use. Pretty nifty!

Re: Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

#20
post #19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how exactly is adding a stored procedure as an agent mind bending

I can only speak for my own mind ;) but the most advanced thing I'd seen prior in this regard was Google Sheets' =AI function, which is pretty convenient (if awkward) when you want to map values to LLM output. What I specifically found "mind-bending" about this is that I don't have a clear concept of the limits of what an agent can do . In the limit case, it's basically like an independent employee, right?. So the co…

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