And that's why I won't touch 'em. All the agents will be abandoned when people realize their inherent flaws (security, reliability, truthfulness, etc) are not worth the constant low-grade uncertainty.

In a way it fits our times. Our leaders don't find truth to be a very useful notion. So we build systems that hallucinate and act unpredictably, and then invest all our money and infrastructure in them. Humans are weird.

Obviously I’m reasonably willing to believe that you are an exception. However every person I’ve interacted with who makes this same claim has presented me with a dumpster fire and expected me to marvel at it.

That there's a learning curve, especially with a new technology, and that only the people at the forefront of using that technology are getting results with it - that's just a very common pattern. As the technology improves and material about it improves - it becomes more useful to everyone.

In a weird way it sort of reminds me of Common Lisp. When I was younger I thought it was the most beautiful language and a shame that it wasn't more widely adopted. After a few decades in the field I've realized it's probably for the best since the average dev would only use it to create elaborate foot guns.

Destiny visits me on my 18th birthday and says, "Gart, your mediocrity will result in a long series of elaborate foot guns. Be humble. You are warned."

see also: react hooks

All I see in your post is equivalent to something like: you're surrounded by boot camp coders who write the worst garbage you've ever seen, so now you have doubts for anyone who claims they've written some good shit. Psh, yeah right, you mean a mudball like everyone else?

In that scenario there isn't much a skilled software engineer with different experiences can interject because you've already made your decision, and your decision is based on experiences more visceral than anything they can add.

I do sympathize that you've grown impatient with the tools and the output of those around you instead of cracking that nut.

Every time i reach for them recently I end up spending more time refactoring the bad code out or in deep hostage negotiations with the chatbot of the day that I would have been faster writing it myself.

That and for some reason they occasionally make me really angry.

Oh a bunch of prompts in and then it hallucinated some library a dependency isn’t even using and spews a 200 line diff at me, again, great.

Although at least i can swear at them and get them to write me little apology poems..

I keep flipping between this is the end of our careers, to I'm totally safe. So far this is the longest 'totally safe' period I've had since GPT-2 or so came along..

It still wants to build an airplane to go out with the trash sometimes and will happily tell you wrong is right. However I much prefer it trying to figure it out by reading logs, schemas and do browser analysis automatically than me feeding logs etc manually.

Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D

https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd is what i use as the "actually good ffmpeg etc front end"

and just to toot my own horn, I hand Simon's `llm` command lone tool access to its own todo list and read/write access to the cwd with my own tools, https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo and https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch

Even with just these and no shell access it can get a lot done, because these tools encode the fundamental tricks of Claude Code ( I have `llmw` aliased to `llm --tool Patch --tool Todo --cl 0` so it will have access to these tools and can act in a loop, as Simon defines an agent. )

You can have a simple dashboard site which collects the data from our shell scripts and shows your a summary or red/green signals so that you can focus on things which are interested in.

In the toy example, you explicitly restrict the agent to supply just a `host`, and hard-code the rest of the command. Is the idea that you'd instead give a `description` something like "invoke the UNIX `ping` command", and a parameter described as constituting all the arguments to `ping`?

I was telling a friend online that they should bang out an agent today, and the example I gave her was `ps`; like, I think if you gave a local agent every `ps` flag, it could tell you super interesting things about usage on your machine pretty quickly.

But... you don't have to use that at all. You can use pure prompting with ANY good LLM to get your own custom version of tool calling:

  Any time you want to run a calculation, reply with:
  {{CALCULATOR: 3 + 5 + 6}}
  Then STOP. I will reply with the result.