How to build a coding agent

by ghuntley • 11 months ago

472 122 11 months ago

ofirpress• 11 months ago

We (the Princeton SWE-bench team) built an agent in ~100 lines of code that does pretty well on SWE-bench, you might enjoy it too: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

cheers i'll add it in.

simonw2• 11 months ago

OK that really is pretty simple, thanks for sharing.

The whole thing runs on these prompts: https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent/blob/7e125e5dd49...

  Your task: {{task}}. Please reply
  with a single shell command in
  triple backticks.
  
  To finish, the first line of the
  output of the shell command must be
  'COMPLETE_TASK_AND_SUBMIT_FINAL_OUTPUT'.

nivertech• 11 months ago

  system_template: str = "You are a helpful assistant that can do anything."

anything? Sounds like an AI Safety issue ;)

sireat• 11 months ago

Pretty sure you also need about 120 lines of prompting from default.yaml

https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent/blob/7e125e5dd49...

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

when a problem is entirely self contained in a file, it's very easy to edit it with LLM.

that's not the case with a codebase, where things are littered around in tune with specific model of organisation the developer had in mind.

koakuma-chan• 11 months ago

in tune with specific model of organisation

You wish

fmbb• 11 months ago

Lumpers win again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

meander_water• 11 months ago

1. Analyze the codebase by finding and reading relevant files 2. Create a script to reproduce the issue 3. Edit the source code to resolve the issue 4. Verify your fix works by running your script again 5. Test edge cases to ensure your fix is robust

This prompt snippet from your instance template is quite useful. I use something like this for getting out of debug loops:

Analyse the codebase and brainstorm a list of potential root causes for the issue, and rank them from most likely to least likely.

Then create scripts or add debug logging to confirm whether your hypothesis is correct. Rule out root causes from most likely to least by executing your scripts and observing the output in order of likelihood.

afro883• 11 months ago

Does this mean it's only useful for issue fixes?

Teever• 11 months ago

What sort of results have you had from running it on its own codebase?

BenderV4• 11 months ago

Nice but sad to see lack of tools. Most your code is about the agent framework instead of specific to SWE.

I've built a SWE agent too (for fun), check it out => https://github.com/myriade-ai/autocode

diminish2• 11 months ago

sad to see lack of tools.

Lack of tools in mini-swe-agent is a feature. You can run it with any LLM no matter how big or small.

zhlmmc• 11 months ago

Totally understandable. General coding agent is 95% from the model.

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

Anyone can build a coding agent which works on a) fresh code base b) when you've unlimited token budget

now build it for old codebase, let's see how precisely it edits or removes features without breaking the whole codebase

lets see how many tokens it consumes per bug fix or feature addition.

simonw2• 11 months ago

This comment belongs in a discussion about using LLMs to help write code for large existing systems - it's a bit out of place in a discussion about a tutorial on building coding agents to help people understand how the basic tools-in-a-loop pattern works.

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

anyone who used those coding agent can already see how it works, you can usually see agent fetching files, running commands, listing files and directories.

i just wrote this comment so people aren't under false belief that it's pretty much all coding agents do, making all this fault tolerant with good ux is lot of work.

pcwelder• 11 months ago

Agree. To reduce costs:

1. Precompute frequently used knowledge and surface early. For example repository structure, os information, system time.

2. Anticipate next tool calls. If a match is not found while editing, instead of simply failing, return closest matching snippet. If read file tool gets a directory, return directory contents.

3. Parallel tool calls. Claude needs either a batch tool or special scaffolding to promote parallel tool calls. Single tool call per turn is very expensive.

Are there any other such general ideas?

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

that info can be just included in preffix which is cache by LLM, reducing cost by 70-80% average. System time varies, so it's not good idea to specify it in prompt, better to make a function out of it to avoid cache invalidation.

I am still looking for a good "memory" solution, so far running without it. Haven't looked too deep into it.

Not sure how next tool call be predicted.

I am still using serial tool calls as i do not have any subagents, i just use fast inference models for directly tools calls. It works so fast, i doubt i'll benefit from parallel anything.

righthand• 11 months ago

Surprise, as rambunctious dev who’s socially hacked their way through promotions, I will just convince our manager we need to rewrite the platform in a new stack or convince them that I need to write a new server to handle the feature. No old tech needed!

NitpickLawyer2• 11 months ago

There's "swe re-bench", a benchmark that tracks model release dates, and you can see how the model did for "real-world" bugs that got submitted on github after the model was released. (obviously works best for open models).

There are a few models that solve 30-50% of (new) tasks pulled from real-wolrd repos. So ... yeah.

cryptoz3• 11 months ago

I really think the current trend of CLI coding agents isn't going to be the future. They're cool but they are _too simple_. Gemini CLI often makes incorrect edits and gets confused, at least on my codebase. Just like ChatGPT would do in a longer chat where the context gets lost: random, unnecessary and often harmful edits are made confidently. Extraneous parts of the codebase are modified when you didn't ask for it. They get stuck in loops for an hour trying to solve a problem, "solving it", and then you have to tell the LLM the problem isn't solved, the error message is the same, etc.

I think the future will be dashboards/HUDs (there was an article on HN about this a bit ago and I agree). You'll get preview windows, dynamic action buttons, a kanban board, status updates, and still the ability to edit code yourself, of course.

The single-file lineup of agentic actions with user input, in a terminal chat UI, just isn't gonna cut it for more complicated problems. You need faster error reporting from multiple sources, you need to be able to correct the LLM and break it out of error loops. You won't want to be at the terminal even though it feels comfortable because it's just the wrong HCI tool for more complicated tasks. Can you tell I really dislike using these overly-simple agents?

You'll get a much better result with a dashboard/HUD. The future of agents is that multiple of them will be working at once on the codebase and they'll be good enough that you'll want more of a status-update-confirm loop than an agentic code editing tool update.

Also required is better code editing. You want to avoid the LLM making changes in your code unrelated to the requested problem. Gemini CLI often does a 'grep' for keywords in your prompt to find the right file, but your prompt was casual and doesn't contain the right keywords so you end up with the agent making changes that aren't intended.

Obviously I am working in this space so that's where my opinions come from. I have a prototype HUD-style webapp builder agent that is online right now if you'd like to check it out:

https://codeplusequalsai.com/

It's not got everything I said above - it's a work-in-progress. Would love any feedback you have on my take on a more complicated, involved, and narrow-focus agentic workflow. It only builds flask webapps right now, strict limits on what it can do (no cron etc yet) but it does have a database you can use in your projects. I put a lot of work into the error flow as well, as that seems like the biggest issue with a lot of agentic code tools.

One last technical note: I blogged about using AST transformations when getting LLMs to modify code. I think that using diffs or rewriting the whole file isn't the right solution either. I think that having the LLM write code that modifies your code and then running that code to affect the modifications is the way forward. We'll see I guess. Blog post: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

Gemini CLI often makes incorrect edits and gets confused

Gemini CLI still uses archaic whole file format for edits, it's not a good representative of current state of coding agents.

cryptoz3• 11 months ago

Oh that's wild, I did suspect that but didn't know it outright. Mind-blowing Google would release that kind of thing, I had wondered why it sucked so much haha. Okay so what is a good representation of the current state of coding agents? Which one should I try that does a better job at code modifications?

lifthrasiir2• 11 months ago

I'm not sure what do you mean by "whole file format", but if it refers to the write_file tool that overwrites the whole file, there is also the replace tool which is apparently inspired by a blog post [1] by Anthropic. It seems that Claude Code also supports the roughly identical tool (inferred from error messages), so editing tools can't be the reason why Claude Code is good.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/swe-bench-sonnet

sitkack• 11 months ago

You are wasting your time and everyone elses with Gemini, it is the worst.

cryptoz3• 11 months ago

Oh I don’t use Gemini! I did try it out and admittedly formed an opinion too narrow on cli agents. But no way do I actually use Gemini.

revskill2• 11 months ago

Where is the program synthesis? My way of thinking is given primitives as tools, i want the model to construct and return the program to execute.

Of course following nix philosophy is another way.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Sonnet does this via the edit tool and bash tool. It’s inbuilt to the model.

revskill2• 11 months ago

Interesting.

normie30006• 11 months ago

Why are any of the tools beyond the bash tool required?

Surely listing files, searching a repo, editing a file can all be achieved with bash?

Or is this what's demonstrated by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45001234?

zarzavat• 11 months ago

Separate tools is simpler than having everything go through bash.

If everything goes through bash then you need some way to separate always safe commands that don't need approval (such as listing files), from all other potentially unsafe commands that require user approval.

If you have listing files as a separate tool then you can also enforce that the agent doesn't list any files outside of the project directory.

normie30006• 11 months ago

you need some way to separate always safe commands that don't need approval (such as listing files), from all other potentially unsafe commands that require user approval.

This is a very strong argument for more specific tools, thanks!

BenderV4• 11 months ago

Why do humans need a IDE when we could do anything in a shell? Interface give you the informations you need at a given moment and the actions you can take.

normie30006• 11 months ago

To me a better analogy would be: if you're a household of 2 who own 3 reliable cars, why would you need a 4th car with smaller cargo & passenger capacities, higher fuel consumption, worse off-road performance and lower top speed?

faangguyindia7• 11 months ago

Why are any of the tools beyond the bash tool required?

My best guess is they started out with a limited subset of tools and realised they can just give it bash later.

the_mitsuhiko3• 11 months ago

Technically speaking, you can get away with just a Bash tool, and I had some success with this. It's actually quite interesting to take away tools from agents and see how creative they are with the use.

One of the reasons why you get better performance if you give them the other tools is that there has been some reinforcement learning on Sonne with all these tools. The model is aware of how these tools work, it is more token-efficient and it is generally much more successful at performing those actions. The Bash tool, for instance, at times gets confused by bashisms, not escaping arguments correctly, not handling whitespace correctly etc.

dotancohen2• 11 months ago

  > The Bash tool, for instance, at times gets confused by bashisms, not escaping arguments correctly, not handling whitespace correctly etc.

This was the only informative sentence in the reply. Can you please go on in this manner - it was an important question.

normie30006• 11 months ago

The model is aware of how these tools work, it is more token-efficient and it is generally much more successful at performing those actions.

Interesting! This didn't seem to be the case in the OP's examples - for instance using a list_files tool and then checking if the json result included README vs bash [ -f README ]

kissgyorgy2• 11 months ago

This is explained in 3.2 How to design good tools?

    This saves the LLM from having to do multiple low level clicking and typing and keeps it on track. Help the poor model out, will ya!?

normie30006• 11 months ago

I'm not sure where this quote is from - it doesn't seem to appear in the linked article.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Yeah, you could get away with a coding agent just using the Bash tool and the Edit tool (tbh somewhat optional but not having it would be highly inefficient). I haven't tried it, but it might struggle with the code search functionality. It would be possible with the right prompting. For example, you could just prompt the LLM to say "If you need to search the source code, use ripgrep with the Bash tool."

normie30006• 11 months ago

Edit tool (tbh somewhat optional but not having it would be highly inefficient)

If you need to edit the source, just use patch with the bash tool.

What's the efficiency issue?

Western0• 11 months ago

Instead of writing about how to build an agent, show us one project that this agent has built.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

I'd love to see you build your own agent and then share it here in HN as a show HN.

chrisweekly• 11 months ago

Thank you for sharing.

And remember to avoid feeding the trolls.

jsjdkdkdkfk• 11 months ago

You haven't built anything. You are just a grifter spinning words in desperate need for attention. No one will ever use your "product" because it's useless. You know this and yet you keep trying to hustle the ignorant. Keep boosting yourself with alts.

nickthegreek• 11 months ago

has this agent fully built anything? that is a pretty straight forward question that you should be expected to answer when submitting something like this to HN.

prodimmune2• 11 months ago

For me, the post is missing an explanation of the reason why I would want to build my own coding agent instead of just using one of the publicly available ones.

dotancohen2• 11 months ago

You wouldn't.

This project and this post are for the curious and for the learners.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Knowing how to build your own agent and what that loop is going to be the new whiteboard coding question in a couple of years. Absolute. It's going to be the same as "Reverse this string", "I've got a linked list, can you reverse it?", or "Here's my graph, can you traverse it?"

prodimmune2• 11 months ago

I see, thanks. I was wondering earlier if there would be any practical advantage in creating a custom agent, but couldn't think of any. I guess I simply misunderstood the purpose of your post.

johannesboyne• 11 months ago

A very similar "how to guide" can be found here https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent written by Thorsten Ball. In general Amp is quite interesting - obviously no hidden gem anymore ;-) but great to see more tooling around agentic coding being published. Also, because similar agentic-approaches will be part of (certain/many?) software suits in the future.

campbellbell• 11 months ago

Makes sense, the author says he also works at Amp

manojlds• 11 months ago

Ghuntley also works at Amp

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Yes

Revisional_Sin• 11 months ago

This looks much better, thank you.

hobofan• 11 months ago

I hate to do meta-commentary (the content is a decent beginner level introduction to the topic!), but this is some of the worst AI-slop-infused presentation I've seen with a blog post in a while.

Why the unnecessary generated AI pictures in between?

Why put everything that could have been a bullet point into it's own individual picture (even if it's not AI generated)? It's very visually distracting, breaks the flow of reading, and it's less accessible as all the picture lack alt-text.

---

I see that it's based on a conference talk, so it's possibly just 1:1 the slides. If that's the case please put it up in it's native conference format, rather than this.

bambax• 11 months ago

Agreed. It's unreadable.

gregrata• 11 months ago

Wow. Yeah. That's unreadable - my frustration and annoyance levels got high fast, had to close the page before I went for the power button on my machine :)

Tewboo• 11 months ago

Building a coding agent involves defining clear goals, leveraging AI, and iterating based on feedback. Start with a simple task and scale up.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Yep, once you've got the base coding agent (as in the workshop above), you can use it to build another agent or anything really. You start from that kernel and you can bootstrap upwards from that point forward and build anything.

akk02• 11 months ago

If a picture is usually worth 1000 words, the pictures in this are on a 99.6% discount. What the actual...?

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

It's a conference workshop; these are the slides from the workshop, and the words are a dictation from the delivery.

akk02• 11 months ago

That seems like a leaky implementation detail to me, for a published piece.

anonzzzies• 11 months ago

what's the best current cli (with a non interactive option) that is on par with Claude code but can work with other llms like ollama, openrouter etc? I tried stuff like aider but it cannot discover files, the open source gemini one but it was terrible; what is a good one that maybe is the same as CC if you plug in Opus?

akdev1l• 11 months ago

Haven’t tried many but the LLM cli seems alright to me

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Opencode is pretty good and likely meets your needs. One thing I'll call out is Gemini is terrible as an agent currently because Gemini is not a very good tool calling LLM. It's an oracle. https://ghuntley.com/cars/

fullstackwife• 11 months ago

Exactly my approach to gaining knowledge and learning through building your own(`npx genaicode`). When I was presenting my work on a local meetup I got this exact question: "why u building this instead of just using Cursor". The answer is explained in this article(tl;dr; transformative experience), even though some parts of it are already outdated or will be outdated very soon as the technology is making progress every day.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Exactly, dude. This is the most important thing, the fundamentals to understand how this stuff works under the hood. I don't get how people aren't curious. Why aren't people being engineers? This is one of the most transformative things to happen in our profession in the last 20 years.

digitcatphd• 11 months ago

The problem I have with this is that this style of agent design, providing enormous autonomy, makes sense in coding while keeping an expert human in the loop since it can self-correct via debugging. What would the other use cases of giving an agent this much autonomy be today versus a more structured flow versus something more like LangGraph?

_pdp_• 11 months ago

Very simplistic view on the problem domain IMHO. Yah sure we can add a bunch of functions... ok. But how about snapshotting (or at least work with git), sandboxing both process and network level, prompt engineering, detect when stuck, model switching with parallel solvers for better solutions. These are the kind of things that make coding agents reliable - not function declarations.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

It will be included as part of the third instalment. I write these coding agents for a living. Need to start with the basics as the basics is what people need to know to be able to automate functions at their employer, which may not be coding agents. This workshop was delivered at a data engineering conference, for example.

user3939382• 11 months ago

The trick with coding agent is guiding the attention towards tasks it can expect will fit in the agent’s token window and deciding when to delegate. Funny as a PM you have the exact problem.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Yep. What you need to do is set its direction and then blow wind into its sails.

codingdave2• 11 months ago

You just keep throwing tokens at the loop, and then you've got yourself an agent.

Money. Replace "tokens" with "money". You just keep throwing money at the loop, and then you've got yourself an agent.

ghuntley16• 11 months ago

Who says that tokens are money? Local models are getting really good. For now, yes, if you want the best outcomes, you need to purchase tokens. But in the future, that may not be the case.

rvz• 11 months ago

Local models are getting really good.

They are great for basic tasks like summarization and translation but for the best results from coding agents and from 90% of so-called AI startups who are using these APIs, they are all purchasing tokens.

No different to operating a slot-machine towards vibe-coders who are the AI companies favourite type of customer - spending endless amounts of money on tokens for another spin at fixing an error they don't understand.

codingdave2• 11 months ago

I'd argue that local models still cost money, albeit less than the vendors would cost. Unless you happen to live off-grid and get your own electricity for free. I suppose there are free tiers available that work for some things as well.

But with edge-case exceptions aside, yes, tokens cost money.

ahrjay• 11 months ago

I had a go at this using the on-device models in edge and chrome, phi4-mini and gemini nano, worked surprisingly well for such small models.

https://ryanseddon.com/ai/how-to-build-an-agent-on-device/

russfink• 11 months ago

Can someone please explain the axes: Oracle, Agent, high safety and low safety?

apwell23• 11 months ago

how does opencode use my claude code subscription instead of making me use api key.

thats one of the things stoppng me from rolling my own. having to use pay per use api.

esafak• 11 months ago

It works with Claude Pro/Max subscriptions. https://opencode.ai/docs/#configure

popcorncowboy• 11 months ago

It simply spoofs itself as Claude Code when calling the API. Anthropic will shut this down the second it benefits them to do so. Like much of the gravy train right now, enjoy it while it lasts.

wslomo• 11 months ago

The “valley of it will take our jobs” is an approaching light in the train tunnel.

I live in the “valley”. I battle depression daily that I had before LLMs.

Using LLMs and false guardrails to watchdog inherently deceitful output is a bad system smell.

I know most are “on it”, and I’ve written a coding agent.

But why is this page designed like some brainwashing repetitive Orwellian mantra?

If it’s perceived that we need that, then we’re having to overcome something, and that something is common sense.

So maybe we’ll happily write our coding agents with the intent to stand on the shoulders of a giant.

But everyone knows we’re building the technological equivalent of a crystal meth empire.

ITB• 11 months ago

So what do you want to do about it? It can’t be stopped.

bgwalter• 11 months ago

Even positive things like nuclear energy have been stopped in Germany for example, against an industry lobby that was almighty in the 1980s.

Negative things like IP stealing "AI" can be stopped as well, and the population is increasingly watchful and will organize itself at some point.

losvedir• 11 months ago

Can someone confirm my understanding of how tool use works behind the scenes? Claude, ChatGPT, etc, through the API offer "tools" and give responses that ask for tool invocations which you then do and send the result back. However, the underlying model is a strictly text based medium, so I'm wondering how exactly the model APIs are turning the model response into these different sort of API responses. I'm assuming there's been a fine-tuning step with lots of examples which put desired tool invocations into some sort of delineated block or something, which the Claude/ChatGPT server understand? Is there any documentation about how this works exactly, and what those internal delineation tokens and such are? How do they ensure that the user text doesn't mess with it and inject "semantic" markers like that?

jedimastert• 11 months ago

Here's some docs from anthropic about their implementation

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use...

The disconnect here is that models aren't really "text" based, but token based, like how compilers don't use the code itself but a series of tokens that can include keywords, brackets, and other things. The output can include words but also metadata

the_mitsuhiko3• 11 months ago

I'm assuming there's been a fine-tuning step with lots of examples which put desired tool invocations into some sort of delineated block or something, which the Claude/ChatGPT server understand?

As far as I know that's what's happening. They are training it to return tool responses when it's unsure about the answer or instructed to do so. There are generic tool trainings for just following the response format, and then probably there are some tool specific trainings. For instance gpt-oss loves to use the search tool, even if it's not mentioned anywhere. Anthropic lists well known tools in their document (eg: text_editor, bash). They are likely to have been trained specifically to follow some deeper semantics compared to just generic tool usage.

The whole thing is pretty brittle and tool invocations are just taking place via in-band signalling, delineated by special tokens or token sequences.

libraryofbabel• 11 months ago

You have the right picture of what’s going on. Roughly:

* The only true interface with an LLM is tokens. (No separation between control and data channels.)

* The model api layer injects instructions on tool calling and a list of available tools into the base prompt, with documentation on what those tools do.

* Tool calling is delineated by special tokens. When a model wants to call a tool, it adds a special block to the response that contains the magic token(s) along with the name of the tool and any params. The api layer then extracts this and forms a structured json response in some tool_calls parameter or whatever that is sent in the api response to the user. The result of the tool coming back from the user through the tool calling api is then encoded with special tokens and injected.

* Presumably, the api layer prevents the user from injecting such tokens themselves.

* SotA Models are good at tool calls because they have been heavily fine-tuned on them, with all sorts of tasks that involve tool calls, like bash invocations. The fine-tuning is both to get them good at tool calls in general, and also probably involves specific tool calls that the model provider wants them to be good at, such as the Claude Sonnet model getting fine-tuned on the specific tools Claude Code uses.

Sometimes it amazes me that this all works so well, but it does. You are right to put your finger on the fine-tuning, as it’s critical for making tool calling work well. Tool calling works without fine-tuning, but it’s going to be more hit-or-miss.

dangoodmanUT• 11 months ago

All these images make it impossibly hard to read... gd scroll simulator

loquisgon• 11 months ago

Nitpicking. What the author calls sequence diagrams are not that. They are flowcharts.

helsinki• 11 months ago

“will transfirm you from being a consumer to a producer”

You mean, “will teach you to make REST calls instead of letting a script do it for you”.

We are all consumers. Unless, of course, you work at one of three companies.

overgard• 11 months ago

I'd love for this kind of thing without the incredibly obnoxious commentary. I felt like I was reading propaganda rather than a how-to.

pnt12• 11 months ago

Late to the party, but thanks to the author for this: I learned a lot from this article, although I have mixed feelings about it.

The good: cool to know more about the agents loops, different types of LLMs, ideas for prompting. I definitely wanna try it - would be cool to prompt the agent to build some feature, have it in a loop of building, testing, reviewing and, go have breakfast, come back and only have to tweak a reasonably legible and working code.

The bad: some of these concepts, maybe they are bit meant to mislead, buy really trigger my 'snake oil alert'. The AI compass? Agentic VS non agentic LLMs? People who are getting work done between meetings? Maybe this is more of a vibe thing, so it's not trivial / logical to explain, but in this space there's so many loosely defined concepts that that really trigger skepticism in me (and others).

The ugly: 1 word slides ;p

mh27• 11 months ago

Can anyone share what font is used in the slides? It's lovely

How to build a coding agent

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