Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

codewithbullet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#61

Post by kkotak »

tomhow wrote: post #38
docheinestages wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YCombinator's investments are unfortunately very questionable nowadays.

People were saying that about YC in 2009, when Airbnb and Stripe were funded. YC’s philosophy has always been to invest in a great many companies, accepting that you can’t know in advance which will succeed, most will fail, but the ones that succeed will be successful enough to pay for all the losses.

That's not just YC's philosophy. That's how seed level funding works in the industry. Spray and Pray.

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#64

Post by andai »

35% faster than swe-mini-agent, nice. You say this is due to somehow parallelizing operations?

I'm using a custom harness based on swe-mini-agent (actually its little brother, their tutorial [0]) and found it way faster than codex (for small tasks) despite being "just bash" in a while loop.

The main difference is that I do the opposite of what you said, i.e. I do dump the context in the prompt. You don't need to grep for what's right in front of you :)

But my repos are small (often smaller than Claude's system prompt!), and I have a script that dumps an "outline" (e.g. function headers and top level vars).

I had an even smaller harness for surgical edits but it was a bit too fiddly and I missed the "let it poke around and figure stuff out" mode of full agentic ones.

What I do miss from that old one though is that it could edit several files simultaneously, in one LLM call. Maybe someday I'll add that back :)

That being said, within a few months everyone who cares about speed will be on Cerebras etc., which will make even the slow harnesses way faster than mine and yours! (I've tested them already and it's insane how fast it is...)

[0] https://minimal-agent.com/

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#65

Post by alsima »

throw03172019 wrote: post #62

> Bullet started as an AI hedge fund, a browser-use agent, synthetic financial data (oof), a mobile IDE, and a bunch of other things. Is there another pivot coming? This would make me nervous.

No, we like that we're making this for ourselves as well!

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#66

Post by alsima »

andai wrote: post #63

I expected Download to take me to a page with options, but it downloaded a 200MB .dmg file onto my Android phone.

So sorry about that! We disabled download on iOS, but not Android (we'll fix that), it's not meant to be used on a phone (except for using our remote control feature).

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#67

Post by andai »

yetanotherjosh wrote: post #55

Can someone explain how this actually can go faster than other harnesses? 1. Model routing. Do you regret giving a task to Fable when it could have literally been done by Sonnet? This is the one thing that I can understand. 2. Targeted code + context search. We think embedding the whole repo is dumb. We also think sticking the whole context (or compressed context) in chat is dumb. So we do faster and better greps ove…

(Not the author but) To your last question, I was able to replicate some of the benefits of my custom harness in Claude by just adding a custom MCP, startup hooks etc.

The issue I ran into is that I was fighting Claude's system prompt, which told it to do things which negated most of the benefits of my setup...

For context my startup hook was "grep def", lol. (Now working in js I have grep function, grep class, interface etc.). Gives it a little outline for context, saves time poking around blindly. My repos are small though, this is still a big blob if you have very large repos.

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#68

Post by alsima »

andai wrote: post #64

35% faster than swe-mini-agent, nice. You say this is due to somehow parallelizing operations? I'm using a custom harness based on swe-mini-agent (actually its little brother, their tutorial [0]) and found it way faster than codex (for small tasks) despite being "just bash" in a while loop. The main difference is that I do the opposite of what you said, i.e. I do dump the context in the prompt. You don't need to grep…

Really cool that you built your own harness off of mini-swe-agent, we took a lot of inspiration from that. We're looking forward to trying out Sol Ultra Fast ourselves too! In our own experience, testing, building, searching, and other tool work still dominate a lot of time, but yes there could be a future where harnesses don't matter at all...but we expect Cerebras will also be super expensive :/

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#69

Post by throw03172019 »

alsima wrote: post #65
throw03172019 wrote: post #62

> Bullet started as an AI hedge fund, a browser-use agent, synthetic financial data (oof), a mobile IDE, and a bunch of other things. Is there another pivot coming? This would make me nervous.

No, we like that we're making this for ourselves as well!

Great, thank you. Will try it.

Re: Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

#70

Post by lowbloodsugar »

Does anyone think a harness is something that can generate money? I’ve got my own harness. I use it in preference to any of the others. I even turned its tools into an MCP so Claude could use it. It vastly improved Claude’s iteration speed but I still prefer my own UI. If I didn’t work at whatever we’re calling a FAANG these days it’d be on GitHub - and nobody would use it because they’d just point their own AI at it and clone it. It’s just not that hard. Learned a bunch about rust. Got a better harness. Time well spent.
Post reply on HN