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andykHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Hey, project lead here

Hey, project lead here. I had a very specific use case in mind: I’m playing with using LLM agent frameworks for software engineering - like MemGPT, swe-agent, Langchain and my own hobby project called headlong ( https://github.com/andyk/headlong ). Headlong is focused on making it easy for a human to edit the thought history of an agent via a webapp. The longer term goal of headlong is collecting large-ish human curated datasets that intermix actions/observations/inner-thoughts and then use those data to fine-tune models to see if we can improve their reasoning. While working on headlong I tried out and implemented a variety of ‘tools’ (i.e., functions) like editFile(), findFile(), sendText(), checkTime(), searchWeb(), etc., which the agents call using LLM function calling. A bunch of these ended up being functions that interacted with an underlying terminal. This is similar to how swe-agent works actually. …

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MO
MobiusHorizonsHN

Reading the readme, I find myself wondering what problems this solves for. The example of wrapping nano strikes me as particularly odd, since editing files is already fairly easy to do programmatically either via direct file operations or with tools like sed. Aside from editors, most tools that offer a tui also expose the functionality for programmatic access (typically with some additional flags to the same binary). So it just strikes me as the wrong abstraction to interact with most things. The other potential goal I could imagine was automation. If that is the case, I would recommend the author to make that more clear in the examples and also to describe it in relation to `expect`, which would probably be my go to tool for such use cases. Whatever the case it does look like a fun project, even if I don’t see any cases where it would be the right tool for the job.

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MobiusHorizonsHN

This makes a lot of sense. I would call that out, because it's really surprising out of context. Hopefully you can see how unusual it would be to try to use human interfaces from code for which in at least the majority of cases, there are programatic interfaces for each task that already exist, and would be much less bug prone / finicky. I guess the analogy would be choosing to use Webdriver to interact with a service for which there is already an API.

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loa_in_HN

I'm surprised you didn't have luck with tmux as there's built-in buffer to file command

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