binalpatel
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
557
Submissions
130
Member since
Sep 3
https://www.linkedin.com/in/binalpatel1
https://binal.pub
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Comment · 9 months ago
The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I gave it a try here with some opinionated choices:
https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith
Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash.
It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harness for the very specific environments they end up in (whether it's a business, or a super personalized agent for a user, etc). How to make it not a security nightmare is probably the biggest open question and why I assume Anthropic/others haven't gone full bore into it.
Comment · 9 months ago
This is admittedly dated but even back in December 2023 GPT-4 with it's Vision preview was able to very reliably do structured extraction, and I'd imagine Gemini 3 Flash is much better than back then.
https://binal.pub/2023/12/structured-ocr-with-gpt-vision/
Back of the napkin math (which I could be messing up completely) but I think you could process a 100 page PDF for ~$0.50 or less using Gemini 3 Flash?
>560 input tokens per page * 100 pages = 56000 tokens = $0.028 input ($0.5/m input tokens) >~1000 output tokens per page * 100 pages = $0.30 output ($3/m output tokens)
(https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3#media_resolut...)
Comment · 9 months ago
It reuses previously generated code, so tools it creates persists from session to session. It also lets the LLM avoid actually “seeing” the tokens in some cases since it can pipe directly between tools/write to disk instead of getting returned into the LLMs context window.
Comment · 9 months ago
I've been using it daily, so far it's built CLIs for hackernews, BBC news, weather, a todo manager, fetching/parsing webpages etc. I asked it to make a daily briefing one that just composes some of them. So the first thing it runs when I message it in the morning is the daily briefing which gives me a summary of top tech news/non-tech news, the weather, my open tasks between work/personal. I can ask for follow ups like "summarize the top 5 stories on HN" and it can fetch the content and show it to me in full or give me a bullet list of the key points.
Right now I'm thinking through how to make it more "proactive" even if it's just a cron that wakes it up, so it can do things like query my emails/calendar on an ongoing basis + send me alerts/messages I can respond to instead of me always having to message it first.
Comment · 9 months ago
I went down (continue to do down) this rabbit hole and agree with the author.
I tried a few different ideas and the most stable/useful so far has been giving the agent a single run_bash tool, explicitly prompting it to create and improve composable CLIs, and injecting knowledge about these CLIs back into it's system prompt (similar to have agent skills work).
This leads to really cool pattens like: 1. User asks for something
2. Agent can't do it, so it creates a CLI
3. Next time it's aware of the CLI and uses it. If the user asks for something it can't do it either improves the CLI it made, or creates a new CLI.
4. Each interaction results in updated/improved toolkits for the things you ask it for.
You as the user can use all these CLIs as well which ends up an interesting side-channel way of interacting with the agent (you add a todo using the same CLI as what it uses for example).
It's also incredibly flexible, yesterday I made a "coding agent" by having it create tools to inspect/analyze/edit a codebase and it could go off and do most things a coding agent can.
Comment · 9 months ago
100% - sharing CLIs with the agent has felt like another channel to interact with them once I’ve done it enough, like a task manager the agent and I can both use using the same interface
Comment · 9 months ago
Cool to see lots of people independently come to "CLIs are all you need". I'm still not sure if it's a short-term bandaid because agents are so good at terminal use or if it's part of a longer term trend but it's definitely felt much more seamless to me then MCPs.
(my one of many contribution https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith)
Comment · 1 year ago
Pydantic-AI is lovely - I've been working on a forever, fun project to build a coding agent CLI for a year plus now. IMO it does make constructing any given agent very easy, though the lower level APIs are a little painful to use but they seem to be aware of that.
https://github.com/caesarnine/rune-code
Part of the reason I switched to it initially wasn't so much it's niceties versus just being disgusted at how poor the documentation/experience of using LiteLLM was and I thought the folks who make Pydantic would do a better job of the "universal" interface.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is super impressive.
Interesting they're framing this more from the world model/agent environment angle, when this seems like the best example so far of generative games.
720p realtime mostly consistent games for a minute is amazing, considering stable diffusion was originally released 2ish years ago.
Comment · 2 years ago
Under $100:
The heat gun mosquito things that some tech folks were mentioning on Twitter. Always get quarter sized terribly itchy bumps for each mosquito bites and using it makes them essentially itch-free immediately.
Under $1000:
Weekly house cleaning. Such reduced cognitive load/increased free time to not have to clean all the time, think about cleaning, etc especially with a toddler.
Comment · 2 years ago
This is going to wreck Goldman's next analysis.
(context: https://the-decoder.com/goldman-sachs-blunder-adds-to-ai-sto...)