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Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

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Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#231
post #189

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Before I tried coding agents my guess would have been: none. But seeing how slow claude code and copilot cli are and how much ram they use I'm flabbergasted. If you have long running sessions they can both take tens pf gigabytes of ram and feel quite sluggish.

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Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#232
post #228
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

latency and throughput (when with Java the system is crying for more memory while it's chilling in the Rust case)

What's the latency difference between a long running process issuing a network call in Java vs rust? This is such a short time that it is completely overshadowed by noise (OS doing something else, what other software is running etc) As for throughput: you have 1-2 requests going at a time, the next one waiting for the reply. What throughput are we talking about? That's like speeding to the post office and expecting y…

you seem to specifically aim at the current example, but mine wasn't

Anyways, consider how higher memory usage can affect the systems performance dramatically once the system needs to start swapping memory to disk signficantly

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't skills fairly easy to share, and can contain more than one file?

Prompts as well... he might be on to something here, can't say as I didn't try it yet Skills are just prompts

Skills are not just prompts.. the entire problem that skills solve is runtime discoverability via a skill description. Agents can self-recognize that a skill would be useful in a situation, and then load+use.

Prompts are just text templates entered by the user, and the user must specifically know when to and remember to invoke them. If you’re just using skills as if they are the same as prompts, you’re totally missing out on the entire benefit that skills provide!

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#234
post #190

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

I didn't see anyone mention this, but I think having a single binary is much nicer than having a JS (or Python) program sprawled all over your system.

Having single binary output is completely different problem and is solved for both Python and typescript (bun supports the later).

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simpler alternative to Skills this concerns me. Skills are already just about the simplest possible thing; they're just prompts, in a directory!

Skills are notably more complex than that. They require metadata (which the model is given and uses to determine whether or not to load the main file), are intended to be loaded via a tool call, contain extra resources (also loaded by tool calls), etc. In contrast, with this system the harness doesn't need a tool to load the stored prompts, the prompts don't need to include metadata to allow for runtime discovery, et…

Runtime discovery is the entire point of skills. Without it, this is just a templating prompt system that the user has to remember to use… except because this one changes your system prompt, it also busts your cache and costs you extra money when you use a prompt.

Skills are already dead-simple and this prompt system doesn’t at all tackle the same problem.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#236
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that‘s not an issue with the coding agent. It’s the model that doesn’t follow the instructions. Given how an LLM works, you can never be sure it will always work. LLMs are not deterministic.

Isn't a harness supposed to guide and steer yhe coding agent?

While the harness can block certain actions (e.g., tool usage), it can’t enforce perfect adherence to instructions because the model itself is probabilistic. The harness can reduce deviations, but it can’t eliminate the fundamental unpredictability of LLMs.

The rules that are fed into the AI are not unbreakable laws to the AI. We should always remember that.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#237
> Bash execution ... optional sandboxing for isolation

Sandboxing should be the default. Rather than routinely allowing unsandboxed access, one should be able to configure the sandbox to allow exactly what is needed

That's hard. For example, I've been unable to give wayland access to agents inside the sandbox (there's a special flag in bubblewrap to mount /dev/dri in a way you can make use of it, but you also must give access to the wayland socket, and maybe other things). So I think that maybe harnesses should invest in more sandboxing resources

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#238
post #189

I understand the need for memory footprint in some situations, but what's the point of seeking performance for a software that mostly calls LLMs and waits?

Before I tried coding agents my guess would have been: none. But seeing how slow claude code and copilot cli are and how much ram they use I'm flabbergasted. If you have long running sessions they can both take tens pf gigabytes of ram and feel quite sluggish.

Yes...exactly. Its frustrating and inefficient.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#239
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what LLMs actually consume, your agent makes zero difference

Why would anyone compare a cloud LLMs power usage when one doesn't pay for it? Local power consumption is important for those.

OP specifically cited “reduce the footprint on the planet”

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#240

The key thing with pi is that it can extend itself. How does that work when it’s written in rust?

The usual way to make a Rust program extensible is to embed a wasm interpreter. Then the agent can extend it by writing an extension in Rust or any other language that compiles to wasm. Zed does it for example
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