lukebuehler

Exactly! The sheer effort of having AI produce good results, from writing, to planning, to coding is immense. I have consistently gather all my energies and focus to guide agents to the ideal, maintainable, and usable solution. Often it is me that makes the crucial design contribution.

Yes, I could be lazy and just vibe piles of slop. But anyone who spends any meaningful amount of time using AI (more than the articles 10 minutes), knows that quite extreme concentration and effort is required to build ambitiously with agents.

I feel like I work harder and and with more difficult problems than before AI, just at a much faster pace and scope.

I agree. Harnesses are quickly becoming the next systems programming frontier. The OS analogy is apt and often made--just like browsers have been compared to becoming "platforms" and "OSes". Another analogy that is obvious is threads/processes and agents and sub-agents: all the concurrency, shared resource access, cooperative multitasking, etc problems are emerging again.

It will take some time to shake out, but lots of old ideas are new again. Personally, I'm mining lisp machines, homoiconicity, actor models, and other ideas for my harness designs.

oof, the post smelled AI generated to me, more in content than voice. so instead of writing software, his agents are actually karma farming

Not infinitely, but 6-12 hour long individual runs: complex analysis in enterprise across many data sources. Basically, long running investigations that touch databases, many files, apps via computer use, and so on.

What is interesting here is the _library_ approach to durable agents. All the other options I listed, including mine, take more of an SDK/batteries included approach. So this is very much in line with the Pi philosophy in general.

So, it'll be interesting to see if these durable agent setups need more of a complete product approach, or if people want to compose them as libraries.

I think you should look into Pi Durable wich was just released right now too. seems like it is made for your use-case.

Yes, from your release post I can tell that you put a lot of thought into it!

I like your structured concurrency approach with tasks, which is similar to how I do it in Lightspeed too.

Also, the durable state implementation as documents is elegant! Question, though: why directly write/read to the store, why not abstract it and do more of a reducer/redux pattern and hide the persistence of the documents?

yeah, it's not 100% clear, but notice nothing you quoted indicates that the dot harness itself runs inside said workspace. If you look at where OAI agent architecture has been going, they increasingly separate the harness from the compute env. See, "separating harness from compute" articles, recent "managed agents" offering, and so on.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.

There is a really good discussion on exactly this analogy in the Jonas paper I posted in a top-level comment. Jonas considers Torpedoes (starting on p. 182, section III). Unfortunately too long to post here. But he asks where to locate purpose and agency in these automated systems. So as with the article, the question is less in "can these things be dangerous" but more where does the agency and intent reside. The answer is of course they can be used as weapons, but the intent and motivation does not really reside in the mechanism (drone, torpedo, AI agent), but in the humans behind them. The fallacy is trying to attribute full autonomy (and hence responsibility).

k, I just looked through it for where the latest is. First of all, the earliest version were fully written by me, and then lightly edited with AI. The current state are as follows: intro sentences written by me, "why lightspeed" section too. Quickstart AI written, Features mostly written by me, but AI keeps interfering there. Design was also written by me several times, it also used to be much longer, but I just noticed AI put one a few paragraph of slop in there, I think that's the most egregious--shame on me for not caching it. So, if I look at the readme right now, I would say it's about 60% me. It can be better, I'll make the effort because it really bothers me if readmes are not (mostly) written by humans.

Thank you. Yes, I did. There might be some AI-isms in there, because agents just can’t help themselves to dump their arcanae in there.