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

Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

madalitso.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 144 posts

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#81

Post by p_ing »

dist-epoch wrote: post #79
p_ing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NTFS has a database, the MFT. It can index attributes, such as file names, which are a b+tree. A file's $DATA is also placed into the MFT, unless it doesn't fit, then NTFS allocates virtual cluster numbers (more MFT attributes) which point to the on-disk data structure of the file. All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (si…

The newest Microsoft filesystem, ReFS, remove the MFT. Because it created a lot of problems.

> Because it created a lot of problems.

Please elaborate.

NTFS is still the better choice for common desktop usage. ReFS goals are centered around data integrity but it comes at the cost of performance.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#82

Post by zmmmmm »

I don't think there's a lot magical about files beyond (a) they are native for LLMs and coding because they both process text and (b)when things are rapidly in flux, unstructured formats prosper because flexibility is king. Literally any fixed format you try and describe becomes rapidly outdated and fails to serve the purpose. For example it feels like MCP is already ageing like milk.

Which is mainly to say, trust me, this is a temporary state, the god of complexity is coming. It is utterly inevitable. The people who created React, Kubernetes, all those Java frameworks you hated etc didn't go away. They are right now thinking about how amazing it would be if you if you stacked ten different tools together with brand new structured file formats and databases. We already have "beads" and "gastown" where this is starting. Enjoy these times because a couple of years from now it will already be the end of the "fun" part I think.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#83

Post by green-salt »

malgamves wrote: post #42
tacitusarc wrote: post #7

[flagged]

As the author I can assure you there’s a human behind these words. Interesting times me live in though, I find myself questioning what’s AI and what’s not often too and at the moment we’ve offloaded that responsibility to the good will of authors or platform policy which might have to change soon

Nice dodge! Unfortunately, this made it more obvious.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#84

Post by sethev »

afro88 wrote: post #46
sethev wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs were trained on stuff that people wrote. I get there are "tells", but don't really think people are as good at identifying AI generated text as they think they are...

I wouldn't have picked this article as AI until I got an agent to do some writing for me and read a bunch of it to figure out if I can stand behind it. Now I see the tells everywhere "It's not this. It's that." is particularly common and I can't unsee it. (FWIW I rewrote most of the writing it generated, but it did help me figure out my structure and narrative) The problem I think with AI generated posts is that you…

Yeah, but "it's not X. It's Y" is a common idiom that LLMs picked up from people. That's the point i was making. And it's starting to feel like every post has at least one comment claiming that it was AI generated.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#85

Post by Gigachad »

staplung wrote: post #51

Not knocking the article in any way but from the headline I was expecting - perhaps hoping - this would be about some innovation in filesystems research like it was the 90's again. That's not what this is. It's about how filesystems as they are (and have been for decades) are proving to be powerful tools for LLMs/agents.

I feel like every article on HN now disguises itself as interesting but the content is just the same boring AI slop.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#86

Post by _pdp_ »

In other words, file systems are an excellent way to organise information. I mean, yeah - we've been using them forever.

File systems are not a good abstraction mechanism for remote procedure calls, though. I think it's important to distinguish between the two, since I find there are a lot of articles conflating both - comparing MCPs to SKILLs, which are completely different things.

I think the confusion comes from the fact that MCP came before SKILLs, and there's a mental model where SKILLs are somehow "better than" MCPs. This is like saying local Word documents are better than a fully integrated collaborative office suite. It's just not the same thing.

The reason SKILLs work so well is because there's 50 years of accumulated knowledge of how to run rudimentary Unix tools.

the TLDR

File systems - organising information MCP/APIs - remote procedure calls

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#88

Post by stephbook »

I'm not too deep into agentic coding, but I hadn't understood why people write `SOUL.md` files like no tomorrow. Does anyone think these will be called the same three years from now?

If you've got a coding convention, enforce it using a linter. Have the LLM write the rules and integrate it into the local build and CI tool.

Has noone ever thought about how – gasp – a future human collaborator would be onboarded?

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#89

Post by fragmede »

largbae wrote: post #69

I think this article just speaks to the immaturity of our use of AI at this "moment." Production grade systems might be written by agents running on filesystem skills, but the production systems themselves will run on consistent and scalable data structures. Meanwhile the UI of AI agents will almost certainly evolve away from desktop computers and toward audio/visual interfaces. An agent might get more context from a…

I don't think written prompting will ever go away. Writing helps you organize your thoughts in a way that speaking, umm, ah, wait no, hang on, does not. Writing I can go back and change what I've already written before I hit send. Anybody who's prompted with speech for any length has been "wait no nevermind start over". So STT will get better, sure, it's already quite good. I just don't see text extry entirely going away because Human Intelligence (HI) just doesn't work in a way that speech would be the only interface.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#90

Post by JoeAltmaier »

packetlost wrote: post #63
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59

Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament. Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.

Files in most file systems are uniquely identified by inode and can be referenced by multiple files. Why does everyone forget links?

A dataset can persist across multiple file systems. A UUID is a way to know that one dataset is equivalent (identical) to another. Now you can cache, store-and-forward, archive and retrieve and know what you have.
Post reply on HN