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Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

laude.org

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Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#31

Post by aacid »

walrus01 wrote: post #23

Can we please not normalize telling people to install things by curl piped into bash? I hate this trend. And particularly not for a very new, mostly untested by a wider audience piece of software from a company that few have ever previously heard of. It even says, quoting from the website: "Headlong is alpha research software." Yeah that's totally something I want to curl thing.sh | bash , great idea.... Wow. I under…

You can always read the script file (orm ore realistically feed it to agent). If they distributed appimage or rpm would that be safer anyhow? Cannot it run malitious code same as the script would run?

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#34

Post by Systemerror7A69 »

aacid wrote: post #31
walrus01 wrote: post #23

Can we please not normalize telling people to install things by curl piped into bash? I hate this trend. And particularly not for a very new, mostly untested by a wider audience piece of software from a company that few have ever previously heard of. It even says, quoting from the website: "Headlong is alpha research software." Yeah that's totally something I want to curl thing.sh | bash , great idea.... Wow. I under…

You can always read the script file (orm ore realistically feed it to agent). If they distributed appimage or rpm would that be safer anyhow? Cannot it run malitious code same as the script would run?

One of the big problems is that no one actually does read these scripts. You could say "Oh but it's their own fault, duh" but theres a very legitimate argument to be made users going the path of least resistance and that you shouldn't offload this responsibility on your users.

Regarding appImage or rpm, attackers need to build and package these to inject these, while this curl | bash pipe opens up the possiblity of payloads simply by taking over the domain. And this isn't really that far fetched, just think about the Notepad++ update payload recently. The regular package was unaffected while the domain used for the update was taken over.

Then theres also the argument about normalization. Just like he said, this isn't just something he said, this is a very real argument. You don't want to teach users bad habits. Even if / you / inspect the code you get, not everyone will. And ultimately, we should strive to make the Internet a safer place, if only to get less botnets.

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#35

Post by forestcall »

Really hard to support these types of projects without subscription options. BYOK API only approach can run huge amounts of money. I budget for $200 Pro subscriptions. Just using Openrouter for a dark factory kanban ticket system using frontier models will run you $50-$150 which is about 1 ticket.

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#36

Post by jeffsheldon »

MikhailTal wrote: post #3

Very fascinating, super interesting engineering. Although i do find it very funny how they just bypass a massive vulnerability, basically zero data isolation (even between good actors, let alone bad ones) with 3 sentences. Only in the llm space you can slap a massive limitation like this in the middle of the article and continue like nothing happened > Whatever anyone tells Audel becomes part of the single experience…

The part they punt on ("we haven't studied what happens when two people give conflicting instructions") is the interesting part. That's not a memory problem, it's an authz problem. If everyone writes into one shared stream then there's no model of whose instructions bind the agent or who can override whom. It's resolving the conflict that will generate the greatest "learnings" and advance the agent. This basically becomes a tool designed to misbehave rather than a tool that will learn creatively.

We all know how conflicting instructions to AI end - "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#37

Post by theturtletalks »

A lot of harness launches recently but this one actually stood out to me. Just like the Prime Intellect harness that launched recently, this one also leverages RLM (recursive language model). It’s supposed to allow a persistent agent.

The specifics are really interesting. The model itself can change the user input and when you message it, it gets entered into “its stream of consciousness.”

I have a software factory going with Pi, might swap the main orchestrator with Headlong and have it be persistent to drive the other sessions without me.

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#39

Post by ekabod »

theturtletalks wrote: post #37

A lot of harness launches recently but this one actually stood out to me. Just like the Prime Intellect harness that launched recently, this one also leverages RLM (recursive language model). It’s supposed to allow a persistent agent. The specifics are really interesting. The model itself can change the user input and when you message it, it gets entered into “its stream of consciousness.” I have a software factory g…

What do you mean by "software factory"?

Re: Headlong: A microharness for persistent agents

#40

Post by ffsm8 »

ekabod wrote: post #39
theturtletalks wrote: post #37

A lot of harness launches recently but this one actually stood out to me. Just like the Prime Intellect harness that launched recently, this one also leverages RLM (recursive language model). It’s supposed to allow a persistent agent. The specifics are really interesting. The model itself can change the user input and when you message it, it gets entered into “its stream of consciousness.” I have a software factory g…

What do you mean by "software factory"?

Aka vibecoding platform.

A software that's optimized for agentic development, varying levels of review necessary depending on the technical choices of the factory developer. Some review may be automated via agents itself etc.

Ymmv obviously. Its definitely one of the funnest toy projects I've been working on for the last 5-7 months now (such a factory, mine is unreleased however - just for myself as of today)

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