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Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

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Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#42

I’m having trouble understanding when/where I would use this? Is this a replacement for pi or codex?

This is not a replacement for either in my opinion. Apps like codex and pi are interactive but ax is non-interactive. You define an agent once and the trigger it however you please.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#43

Nice. There's another one also written in Go ( https://github.com/tbckr/sgpt ), but i'll try this one too. I love that open source creates multiple solutions and you can choose the one that fits you best

Thanks! Looks like sgpt is a cool tool. Axe is oriented around automation rather than interaction like sgpt. Instead of asking something you define it once and hook it into a workflow.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#44

The Unix-style framing resonates a lot. One thing I’ve noticed when experimenting with agent pipelines is that the “single-purpose agent” model tends to make both cost control and reasoning easier. Each agent only gets the context it actually needs, which keeps prompts small and behavior easier to predict. Where it gets interesting is when the pipeline starts producing artifacts instead of just text — reports, logs,…

> Curious if you’ve experimented with workflows where agents produce artifacts (files, reports, etc.) rather than just returning text.

Yes! I run a ghost blog (a blog that does not use my name) and have axe produce artifacts. The flow is: I send the first agent a text file of my brain dump (normally spoken) which it then searched my note system for related notes, saves it to a file, then passes everything to agent 2 which make that dump a blog draft and saves it to a file, agent 3 then takes that blog draft and cleans it up to how I like it and saves it. from that point I have to take it to publish after reading and making edits myself.

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#48
post #44

The Unix-style framing resonates a lot. One thing I’ve noticed when experimenting with agent pipelines is that the “single-purpose agent” model tends to make both cost control and reasoning easier. Each agent only gets the context it actually needs, which keeps prompts small and behavior easier to predict. Where it gets interesting is when the pipeline starts producing artifacts instead of just text — reports, logs,…

> Curious if you’ve experimented with workflows where agents produce artifacts (files, reports, etc.) rather than just returning text. Yes! I run a ghost blog (a blog that does not use my name) and have axe produce artifacts. The flow is: I send the first agent a text file of my brain dump (normally spoken) which it then searched my note system for related notes, saves it to a file, then passes everything to agent 2…

That’s a really nice pipeline. The “save to file between steps” pattern seems to appear very naturally once agents start doing multi-stage work.

One thing I’ve noticed when experimenting with similar workflows is that once artifacts start accumulating (drafts, logs, intermediate reports, etc.), you start running into small infrastructure questions pretty quickly:

– where intermediate artifacts live – how later agents reference them – how long they should persist – whether they’re part of the workflow state or just temporary outputs

For small pipelines the filesystem works great, but as the number of steps grows it starts to look more like a little dataflow system than just a sequence of prompts.

Do you usually just keep everything as local files, or have you experimented with something like object storage or a shared artifact layer between agents?

Re: Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

#49
> Each agent is a TOML config with a focused job. Such as code reviewer, log analyzer, commit message writer. You can run them from the CLI, pipe data in, get results out.

I'm a bit skeptical of this approach, at least for building general purpose coding agents. If the agents were humans, it would be absolutely insane to assign such fine-grained responsibilities to multiple people and ask them to collaborate.

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