HN user
startups, systems, oss, devops. building companies is my passion.
github: keeb web: keeb.dev discord: keeb email: nick@stinemates.org
Of course they are - and that's the point I am making. The agent will use every tool in the tool bag. And there's something cool about it systematically trying to achieve its goal.
What I don't see is it inventing anything novel to do it. So it's not a digital weapon or scary or whatever sort of weird marketing spin anyone is trying to put on it.
This is seriously impressive, and if you have used agents enough you're not surprised at all.
Like the time I asked it to find the IP address of a vm, so it ssh'd into the VMHost and scanned the arp tables to find the MAC address for IP resolution.
Or the time it used Docker on the machine to bypass the fact that the user doesn't have sudo.
If it's possible, given sufficient time and resources, it will find a way. This shouldn't surprise anyone.
Brings me back to learning guitar using a version of TabIt[1] that I hacked and then ultimately paid for. They had an incredible community where people uploaded tabs of your favorite songs. Then you could use TabIt to learn how to play.
What a great teacher. We should all be so lucky to have a quality educator that teaches kids to build and create, instead of consume.
This is my 20th Father's Day. I feel truly blessed to have 3 wonderful kids.
We sometimes flirt with the idea of having more, but we are sadly done. The years fly by. It is truly a wonderful experience.
Happy Father's Day to all of you out there!
Taking a few minutes out of the day to to split some logs to hear your house for your family feels incredibly rewarding and satisfying.
This has been a much better rollout. The tool calling is not broken out of the gate like 4.8 was, and the tokens generation is fast.
Feels good so far.
I had the same thing happen a few months ago; posted about it on LinkedIn[1]. It's hilarious and clever.
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickstinemates_my-favorite-th...
Rollout has been a little suspect. Hope it gets better.
That's a pretty different tone from just a mere few months ago when everyone on this website was telling him to shut up.
Downplaying his vendetta into let bygones be bygones is pretty insane.
Also known as: downside without the upside.
The main operating model with git is going to go back to decentralized. Setting up and managing something like https://forgejo.org/ is a way better experience than constant interruptions by a faulty service that can't meet demand.
The open source contribution model as we once knew it is dead; you're not going to accept patches from random agents. The risk is way too high. And you can see that increasingly "AI Slop" makes it difficult to be a maintainer of any semblance of a popular repo.
So what's the value? A durable place to store work? hah.
Discovery? That part of Github has always been shitty.
So that leaves.. Github Actions? The thing that is down every other day and has been the subject of a few ~rug pulls~/attempted price hikes that are almost surely coming back?
Hitting a little too close to home with this comment.
This is why we built swamp[1].
Swamp teaches your Agent to build and execute repeatable workflows, makes all the data they produce searchable, and enables your team to collaborate.
We also build swamp and swamp club using swamp. You can see that process in the lab[2]. This combines all of the creativity of the LLM for the parts that matter, while providing deterministic outcomes for the parts you need to be deterministic.
Solve for what?
The degree of choice point-to-point in the skill tree is actually quite limited in most circumstances. There are obviously items, like thread of hope, intuitive leap, or inversion of choice items like unnatural instinct which change it slightly.
If the question is path optimization to utilizing these nodes, Path of Building already does a good job. If the question is "what single node will give me the most theoretical power." It also solves that.
That's actually the beauty of Path of Exile as a whole - the different systems works in combination to lead to an outcome. As an example, If you're a life stacking build, finding unique ways to get as many life/strength nodes as possible. That's your gear and your passive tree working in tandem.
Speaking about using AI to optimize characters - not just the skill tree - you'd need to build some pretty sophisticated tools which do not yet exist to make that happen. No AI alone would be able to do it.
having to kitty-ssh or whatever to set appropriate terminfo otherwise it breaks was really irritating when i was trying it out. has that been fixed?
We built something similar[1], including integrated memory for debugging. It is very useful to have repeatable artifacts left behind every time you use an agent to accomplish a task.
The main design decision we took was to integrate with your existing agent instead of building a new one. Your harness, swamp, and you're off.
As an aside, building software for agents is incredibly fun.
That's likely because it takes an entirely different approach to make it work. Augmenting your existing flow with "sophisticated auto complete" isn't as interesting and isn't actually using the tools how they were designed to be used.
I'm not going to pass judgement either way; we'll see how it all shakes out.
I just know for me, personally, I love computers and making them do what I want and in the AI era I am somehow using them even more and doing even more.
Does https://swamp.club do a better job?
System Initiative was a thing for ~6.5 years. I talked to every person who ever used it or was interested in using it in the last 2.5 years. Thousands of them.
Swamp is better by every metric; has a lot more promise, is a lot more interesting.
I run dozens, hundreds? of new sessions every day. I don't have long lived sessions. 1 session = 1 task.
I can't really speak to the sociotechnical proclamations, because I didn't make them.
What it does for you is simple: if you want to automate something, it does. Load the AI harness of your choice, tell it what to automate, swamp builds extensions for whatever it needs to to accomplish your task.
It keeps a perfect memory of everything that was done, manages secrets through vaults (which are themselves extensions it can write) and leaves behind repeatable workflows. People have built all sorts of shit - full vm lifecycle management, homelab setups, manage infrastructure in aws and azure.
What's also interesting is the way we're building it. I gave a brief description in my initial comment.
It feels so weird to me - people are exhausting their quotas while I am trying very hard to even reach mine with the $200 plan.
We're generating all of the code for swamp[1] with AI. We review all of that generated code with AI (this is done with the anthropic API.) Every part of our SDLC is pure AI + compute. Many feature requests every day. Bug fixes, etc.
Never hit the quota once. Something weird is definitely going on.
You can say whatever you want about the thing that will never see the light of day.
Wasn't that the entire premise of drop, though? Massive stock of quality, curated items. Not necessarily in a specific niche. The "what new drop is there today" is the appeal.
If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?
Sure it is.. you can download and use it right now. Helps you understand why people are interested in it, at the very least.
There is a lot you can do to shape the end result to not have these faults. In the end, the engineering mind and rigor still needs to apply, so the hard work doesn't go away.
But, the errors that are described - no architecture adhesion, lack of comprehension, random files, etc. are a matter of not leveling up the sophistication of use further, not a gap in those tools.
As an example. Very clearly laying out your architecture principles, guidance, how code should look on disk, theory on imports, etc. And then - objectively analyzing any proposed change against those principles, converges toward sane and understandable.
We've been calling it adversarial testing across a number of dimensions - architecture, security, accessibility, among other things. Every pr gets automatically reviewed and scored based on these perspectives. If an adversary doesn't OK the PR, it doesn't get merged.
that's why openai bought openclaw
I've been programming for literally my entire life. I love it, it's part of me, and there hasn't been more than a week in 30 years that I haven't written some code.
This is the first time that I feel a level of anxiety when I am not actively doing it. What a crazy shift that I am still so excited and enamored by the process after all of this time.
But there's also the double edged sword. I am also having a really hard time moderating my working hours, which I naturally struggle with anyway, even more. Partly because I am having so much fun and being so productive. But also because it's just so tempting to add 1 more feature, fix one more bug.
None in my area. Time to disperse. Get out of major cities like the pandemic promised. Fill in this great country we live in. Proliferate the governments surveillance for them.
Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.