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You should write an agent

fly.io

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Re: You should write an agent

#321

Post by rbren »

solarkraft wrote: post #91
rbren wrote: post #79

Spoiler: it's not actually that easy. Compaction, security, sandboxing, planning, custom tools--all this is really hard to get right. We're about to launch an SDK that gives devs all these building blocks, specifically oriented around software agents. Would love feedback if anyone wants to look: https://github.com/OpenHands/software-agent-sdk

How autonomous/controllable are the agents with this SDK? When I build an agent my standard is Cursor, which updates the UI at every reportable step of the way, and gives you a ton of control opportunities, which I find creates a lot of confidence. Is this level of detail and control possible with the OpenHands SDK? I’m asking because the last SDK that was simple to get into lacked that kind of control.

That's the idea! We have a confirmation_mode that can interrupt at any step in the process.

Re: You should write an agent

#322

Post by tptacek »

t_akosuke wrote: post #308
tptacek wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently bought a mint-condition Alf phone, in the shape of Gordon Shumway of TV's "Alf", out of the back of an old auto shop in the south suburbs of Chicago, and naturally did the most obvious thing, which was to make a Gordon Shumway phone that has conversations in the voice of Gordon Shumway (sampled from Youtube and synthesized with ElevenLabs). I use https://github.com/etalab-ia/faster-whisper-server (I think?…

Been meaning to build something very similar! What hardware did you use? I'm assuming that a Pi or similar won't cut it

Just a cheap VOIP gateway and a NUC I use for a bunch of other stuff too.

Re: You should write an agent

#323

Post by ericd »

_the_inflator wrote: post #282
ericd wrote: post #41

Absolutely, especially the part about just rolling your own alternative to Claude Code - build your own lightsaber. Having your coding agent improve itself is a pretty magical experience. And then you can trivially swap in whatever model you want (Cerebras is crazy fast, for example, which makes a big difference for these many-turn tool call conversations with big lumps of context, though gpt-oss 120b is obviously no…

I agree with you mostly. On the other hand, I think that show or it didn’t happen is essential. Dumping a bit of code into an LLM doesn’t make it a code agent. And what Magic? I think you never hit conceptual and structural problems. Context window? History? Good or bad? Large Scale changes or small refactoring here and there? Sample size one or several teams? What app? How many components? Green field or not? Which…

To be clear, no one in this thread said this is replacing all senior engineers. But it is still amazing to see it work, and it’s very clear why the hype is so strong. But you’re right that you can quickly run into problems as it gets bigger.

Caching helps a lot, but yeah, there are some growing pains as the agent gets larger. Anthropic’s caching strategy (4 blocks you designate) is a bit annoying compared to OpenAI’s cache-everything-recent. And you start running into the need to start summarizing old turns, or outright tossing them, and deciding what’s still relevant. Large tool call results can be killer.

I think at least for educational purposes, it’s worth doing, even if people end up going back to Claude code, or away from genetic coding altogether for their day to day.

Re: You should write an agent

#324

Post by ericd »

Uehreka wrote: post #218
ericd wrote: post #41

Absolutely, especially the part about just rolling your own alternative to Claude Code - build your own lightsaber. Having your coding agent improve itself is a pretty magical experience. And then you can trivially swap in whatever model you want (Cerebras is crazy fast, for example, which makes a big difference for these many-turn tool call conversations with big lumps of context, though gpt-oss 120b is obviously no…

The reason a lot of people don’t do this is because Claude Code lets you use a Claude Max subscription to get virtually unlimited tokens. If you’re using this stuff for your job, Claude Max ends up being like 10x the value of paying by the token, it’s basically mandatory. And you can’t use your Claude Max subscription for tools other than Claude Code (for TOS reasons. And they’ll likely catch you eventually if you tr…

When comparing, are you using the normal token cost, or cached? I find that the vast majority of my token usage is in the 90% off cached bucket, and the costs aren’t terrible.

Re: You should write an agent

#325

Post by thunderfork »

fluidcruft wrote: post #316
philipwhiuk wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At minimum they have to incorporate new data every month or the models will fail to know how many Shrek movies there are and become increasingly wrong in a world that isn't static.

That sort of thing isn't necessary for all use cases. But if you're relying on the system to encode wikipedia or the zeitgeist then sure.

[dead]

Re: You should write an agent

#326

Post by threecheese »

afc wrote: post #269
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>build your own lightsaber I think this is the best way of putting it I've heard to date. I started building one just to know what's happening under the hood when I use an off-the-shelf one, but it's actually so straightforward that now I'm adding features I want. I can add them faster than a whole team of developers on a "real" product can add them - because they have a bigger audience. The other takeaway is that ag…

I also started building my own, it's fun and you get far quickly. I'm now experimenting with letting the agent generate its own source code from a specification (currently generating 9K lines of Python code (3K of implementation, 6K of tests) from 1.5K lines in specifications ( https://alejo.ch/3hi ).

Just reading through your docs, and feeling inspired. What are you spending, token-wise? Order of magnitude.

Re: You should write an agent

#327

Post by baq »

monomers wrote: post #318
baq wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can get a specialized agent to work in its domain at 10% parameters of a foundation model, you can feasibly run locally, which opens up e.g. offline use cases. Personally I’d absolutely buy an LLM in a box which I could connect to my home assistant via usb.

What use cases do you imagine for LLMs in home automation? I have HA and a mini PC capable of running decently sized LLMs but all my home automation is super deterministic (e.g. close window covers 30 minutes after sunset, turn X light on if Y condition, etc.).

the obvious is private, 100% local alexa/siri/google-like control of lights and blinds without having to conform to a very rigid structure, since the thing can be fed context with every request (e.g. user location, device which the user is talking to, etc.), and/or it could decide which data to fetch - either works.

less obvious ones are complex requests to create one-off automations with lots of boilerplate, e.g. make outside lights red for a short while when somebody rings the doorbell on halloween.

Re: You should write an agent

#328

Post by notpachet »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #239
simonw wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to dispute your own experience with people who aren't using this stuff effectively, but the great thing about the internet is that you can use it to track the people who are making the very best use of any piece of technology.

This line of reasoning is smelling pretty "no true Scotsman" to me. I'm sure there were amazing ColdFusion devs, but that hardly justifies the use of the technology. Likewise "This tool works great on the condition that you need to hire a Simon Willison level dev" is almost a fault. I'm pretty confident you could squeeze some juice out of a Markov Chain (ignoring, of course, that decoder-only LLMs are basically fancy…

> I've realized it's probably for the best since the average dev would only use it to create elaborate foot guns

see also: react hooks

Re: You should write an agent

#330

Post by aaronblohowiak »

tptacek wrote: post #217
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #214

THEY SEND THE WHOLE CONTEXT EVERY TIME? Man that seems... not great. sometimes it will go off and spin on something.. seems like it would be a LOT better to roll back than to send a corrective message. hmmm...... this article is nerd-sniping on a massive scale ;D

In the Responses API, you can implicitly chain messages with `previous_response_id` (I'm not sure how old a conversation you can resurrect that way). But I think Codex CLI actually sends the full context every time? And keep in mind, sending the whole context gives you fine-grained control over what does and doesn't appear in your context window. Anyways, if it nerd sniped you, I succeeded. :)

Yes indeed you did succeed. I totally want to try gaslighting an LLM now! Ah to find the time…
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