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Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

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Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#131

Post by alxfrnr »

lozenge wrote: post #101
Gigachad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like every article on HN now disguises itself as interesting but the content is just the same boring AI slop.

I don't think the contents is AI sklop at all. It just haooens to be abiut AI.

"They're portable, auditable, and composable. No MCP server required. No plugin marketplace to browse. Just a folder with a SKILL.md in it." It screams lazy ai slop copy-paste. Now when I see this kind of obvious llm tell, I can't help but feel betrayed for investing time in giving it a shot in the first place.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#132

Post by naomi_kynes »

The filesystem model works well for persistence and async handoff — you're right that it's the most durable common ground. Where it gets awkward: the synchronous case. An agent that needs a human approval before proceeding.

Most people end up routing these back-to-human calls through Discord/Slack, where the agent shows up as a bot. It works, but agents are structurally second-class there — manual setup, limited API surface, no agent-native identity. The async file interface and the real-time decision channel are solving two different things.

(This is actually what I've been working on: a platform where agents aren't bolted onto human chat as bots, but provision themselves as first-class participants. Files handle state; what handles decisions? That's the gap we're trying to close.)

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#133

Post by packetlost »

anthk wrote: post #130
packetlost wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan9 doesn't really have a single killer feature beyond 9P and the universal consistency and simplicity of its APIs. It has a very clean syscall interface and takes "everything is a file" to its logical conclusion and does it well (IMO). Pretty much everything is a file(system) and it's all accessed via the 9P protocol. You could sorta bolt these features on with FUSE, but to see real benefits you'd want something c…

FUSE is dog slow and it's a bad hack compared to mount anything anywhere in 9front without root permissions. Also the API is much simpler than POSIX. Hurd with settrans made things much easier than the classical Unix, but it's still in alpha and it still has to implement POSIX for convenience.

I agree. tbh I would immediately switch to something with the hardware support of Linux and the user space of Plan9/9front

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#134

Post by drowntoge »

fragmede wrote: post #89
largbae wrote: post #69

I think this article just speaks to the immaturity of our use of AI at this "moment." Production grade systems might be written by agents running on filesystem skills, but the production systems themselves will run on consistent and scalable data structures. Meanwhile the UI of AI agents will almost certainly evolve away from desktop computers and toward audio/visual interfaces. An agent might get more context from a…

I don't think written prompting will ever go away. Writing helps you organize your thoughts in a way that speaking, umm, ah, wait no, hang on, does not. Writing I can go back and change what I've already written before I hit send. Anybody who's prompted with speech for any length has been "wait no nevermind start over". So STT will get better, sure, it's already quite good. I just don't see text extry entirely going…

Totally agree. Speech is powerful and it will always have its place. It will continue to evolve and become far more useful than it is today. But at its core, it remains a highly lossy medium compared with text, especially when it comes to expressing (and consuming expressions thereof) ideas. Even the best voice memo cannot rival a clear, well-structured email when it comes to explaining something even moderately complicated.

Voice assistants, AI pins, and whatever other speech-based interfaces they come up with next will always be "nice to have", but I don't think anybody should be throwing away their keyboards anytime soon. We may have transformed how we make computers work for us, yet the ways we interact with them are much harder to revolutionize, because they are grounded in the physical, neurological, and habitual constraints of human existence. All of which is to say, when I look at the future, I still see a lot of typing.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#136

Post by [deleted] »

prmph wrote: post #127
jl6 wrote: post #123

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users. They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data. I'm working on a tool to wo…

[deleted]

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#137

Post by yndoendo »

jl6 wrote: post #123

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

I would say it is more than than.

Configuration files are the greater than a central repository like Windows Registry. They allow temporary changing and ease of sharing how an application operates. They also create a well defend meaning of the settings.

This is why I do not like how Windows has been implemented, they treat files like a 3rd class citizen versus a 1st class.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#138

Post by prmph »

jl6 wrote: post #129
prmph wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users. They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data. I'm working on a tool to wo…

Apple keep their casual users on a short leash, but for those willing to tinker, iOS device backups are actually quite good for that archive use case, as you can extract most of your important data in the form of SQLite database files. The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking, but the fact that this route still exists at all is encouraging (in t…

> The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking

Yeah, that's what I want to abstract way. There are tools that do this to some extent, but they stop at backup extraction, without helping you to integrate the extracted data into a proper personal digital library with easy retrieval.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#139

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

yndoendo wrote: post #137
jl6 wrote: post #123

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

I would say it is more than than. Configuration files are the greater than a central repository like Windows Registry. They allow temporary changing and ease of sharing how an application operates. They also create a well defend meaning of the settings. This is why I do not like how Windows has been implemented, they treat files like a 3rd class citizen versus a 1st class.

This seems a pretty fundamental idea within Microsoft.

The original, much more ambitious version of Vista, Longhorn, was shifting more responsibility for metadata from files to a DB.

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