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

crates.io

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

#261

Post by amelius »

tcfhgj wrote: post #213
amelius wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because it means people will use Rust for the wrong reasons. Systems programming is only a tiny fraction of code out there. Approaching every problem as a systems programming problem is a massive waste of resources and intellect.

it saves a lot of resources - for instance my devices would probably use less than half of the memory it uses now and I wouldn't hear the fan.

You won't hear the fan because you're still building it.

The resources I was talking about are developers × time.

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

#262

Post by lunar_mycroft »

cobolcomesback wrote: post #235
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"{Feature} is the whole point of {more complex technology}" is an objection that can very often be raised. That doesn't mean that giving up features in exchange for simplicity is always the wrong call. And there's also advantages to having the user drive what instructions go into the prompt instead of the harness/model.

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

#263

Post by cyberpunk »

krzyk wrote: post #245
cyberpunk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come the official codex install instructions say use npm install? (I just rebuilt my sandbox vm a few days ago….) Or are there two separate codex clients? https://developers.openai.com/codex/cli

Because people are crazy, usage of npm for installing binaries is quite common unfortunately.

So …. do I understand it right? openai, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now, with very deep pockets, distribute their official rust cli via the … public npm repo?

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

#264

Post by tcfhgj »

hnlmorg wrote: post #248
tcfhgj wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you cannot write a simple Java agent without consuming so much RAM that your system is swapping then that really says more about the developer than anything. Java is used in plenty of embedded systems and other memory constrained environments. Yes, it’s not going to perform well compared with Rust, but that doesn’t mean it’s an Electron-equivalent bloated clusterfuck of an ecosystem that’s going to eat all your sy…

> so much

1) the agent is probably not the only thing running on the system, so more is just worse generally

2) I am fine if a developer needs Rust or similar to write a resource efficient app. I wonder what the developer could achieve when he put the optimization effort into the Rust app instead.

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

#265

Post by faangguyindia »

rullopat wrote: post #173

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?

If you write in Go, you get faster compile time, more likely your code will compile fine after long time.

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

#266

Post by tcfhgj »

amelius wrote: post #261
tcfhgj wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it saves a lot of resources - for instance my devices would probably use less than half of the memory it uses now and I wouldn't hear the fan.

You won't hear the fan because you're still building it. The resources I was talking about are developers × time.

I am talking about using software - if software is used by many people, that's the more relevant resource usage.

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

#267

Post by amelius »

angusturner wrote: post #211
amelius wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because it means people will use Rust for the wrong reasons. Systems programming is only a tiny fraction of code out there. Approaching every problem as a systems programming problem is a massive waste of resources and intellect.

For small to medium projects, an LLM can write functional (if not well crafted) Rust. Considering how easy this is now, why choose a heavier, slower and less typesafe language?

Ok, so write your app in the garbage collected language, and then tell the LLM to translate it to Rust :)

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

#269

Post by cobolcomesback »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #262
cobolcomesback wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"{Feature} is the whole point of {more complex technology}" is an objection that can very often be raised. That doesn't mean that giving up features in exchange for simplicity is always the wrong call. And there's also advantages to having the user drive what instructions go into the prompt instead of the harness/model.

This is tangential to the point. It’s often great to have a simpler version of a solution, even if it eschews some features. But this isn’t that. OP claims that the prompt system is an “alternative” to skills, but it isn’t. It isn’t solving the same problem that skills solve at all. It’s like saying that a bicycle is a simpler alternative to a lawnmower because they both have wheels.

Prompts are a feature that are simpler than skills, sure, but they’re a completely different feature entirely.

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