Maybe this is a reductive comment, but how does this differ from just letting your agent bash tool a `python -c` command (or anything of that class)? I'm not really getting where this is a "wow" moment?
It is always nice to appreciate how much power you get out of (Model + the absolute bare minimum of control flow). There is just so much baked into the models now that given an inch they will take a mile.
The blog is about writing an agent when you dont already have an agent, but only a plain LLM. It stitches the minimal pieces together. Agents dont need lots of supporting infra, so it is good to keep the code concise. Not a wow moment for sure, though some people think that agents and harnesses are complicated.
You're not wrong. I did a similar agent in lisp back with Sonnet 3.5 and had a wow moment, but the wow was mostly for seeing an agent working effectively at all at that point in time.
The part that killed it for me was losing everything if the lisp crashed (sonnet 3.5 was prone to doing that) and solving persistence had too many edge cases and confused the model.
Later realized that writing the agent as 20 lines of bash was equivalently powerful to the lisp agent, but made persistence trivial from the easy file system interop.
By my eye it's not that different, it's riffing in it from a Lisp perspective.
It's pretty amazing to write your own agent BTW. I've got a zero-dependency all-in-one-file agent harness I wrote myself. I use it all the time now because I can get it from anywhere and I can know EXACTLY what it'll do (as much as you can with any model), what it's been told vs not. Using it as a harness for models I'm hosting myself makes me feel like some kind of LLM homesteader: it's a set of tools I'll always have that will only change as much as I want it to change.
Maybe this is a reductive comment, but how does this differ from just letting your agent bash tool a `python -c` command (or anything of that class)? I'm not really getting where this is a "wow" moment?
It is always nice to appreciate how much power you get out of (Model + the absolute bare minimum of control flow). There is just so much baked into the models now that given an inch they will take a mile.
The blog is about writing an agent when you dont already have an agent, but only a plain LLM. It stitches the minimal pieces together. Agents dont need lots of supporting infra, so it is good to keep the code concise. Not a wow moment for sure, though some people think that agents and harnesses are complicated.
You're not wrong. I did a similar agent in lisp back with Sonnet 3.5 and had a wow moment, but the wow was mostly for seeing an agent working effectively at all at that point in time.
The part that killed it for me was losing everything if the lisp crashed (sonnet 3.5 was prone to doing that) and solving persistence had too many edge cases and confused the model.
Later realized that writing the agent as 20 lines of bash was equivalently powerful to the lisp agent, but made persistence trivial from the easy file system interop.
By my eye it's not that different, it's riffing in it from a Lisp perspective.
It's pretty amazing to write your own agent BTW. I've got a zero-dependency all-in-one-file agent harness I wrote myself. I use it all the time now because I can get it from anywhere and I can know EXACTLY what it'll do (as much as you can with any model), what it's been told vs not. Using it as a harness for models I'm hosting myself makes me feel like some kind of LLM homesteader: it's a set of tools I'll always have that will only change as much as I want it to change.
Littered with AI writing tells.