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Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

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Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#11

Post by orsorna »

q3k wrote: post #9
tacitusarc wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Everyone's trying to be the new thought leader enlightened technical essayist. So much fluff everywhere.

What's wild is that with a few minutes of manual editing it would give exponential return. For instance, a lead sentence in your section saying "here's why X" that was already described by your subheading is unnecessary and could have been wholly removed.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#14

Post by jmathai »

korbatz wrote: post #5

I was having exact same observation, albeit from a bit diffrent perspective: SaaS. This is where as the code tends to be temporary and very domain specific, the data (files) must strive to be boring standards. The problem today is that we build specific, short-lived apps that lock data into formats only they can read. If you don't use universal formats, your system is fragile. We can still open JPEGs from 1995 becaus…

My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library.

It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience.

For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just markdown and csv files for Claude Code (for research and document writing).

[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#15

Post by gzread »

orsorna wrote: post #11
q3k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's trying to be the new thought leader enlightened technical essayist. So much fluff everywhere.

What's wild is that with a few minutes of manual editing it would give exponential return. For instance, a lead sentence in your section saying "here's why X" that was already described by your subheading is unnecessary and could have been wholly removed.

You'd have to have a good idea of how you want the document to read, which is half (or more) of the process of writing it.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#19

Post by bsenftner »

jmclnx wrote: post #3

Funny, decades ago (mid-80s), I had to write a onetime fix on a what would be now a very low memory system, the data in question had a unique key of 8 7bit-ascii characters. Instead of reading multi-meg data into memory to determine what to do, I used the file system and the program would store data related to the key in sub directories instead. The older people saw what I did and thought that was interesting. With d…

Reminds me of early data driving approaches. Early CD based game consoles had memory constraints, which I sidestepped by writing the most ridiculous simple game engine: the game loop was all data driven, and "going somewhere new" in the game was simply triggering a disc read given a raw sector offset and the number of sectors. That read was then a repeated series of bytes to be written at the memory address given by the first 4 bytes read and next 4 bytes how many bytes to copy. That simple mechanism, paired with a data organizer for creating the disc images, enabled some well known successful games to have "huge worlds" with an executable under 100K, leaving the rest of the console's memory for content assets, animations, whatever.
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