I've never maintained software long-term so i could be wrong, but I interpret "code is cheap" to mean that you can have coding agents refactor or rewrite the project from scratch around the design correction. I don't think 'code is cheap' ever should be interpreted to mean ship hacky code.
I think using agents to prototype code and design will be a big thing. Have the agent write out what you want, come back with what works and what doesn't, write a new spec, toss out the old code and and have a fresh agent start again. Spec-driven development is the new hotness, but we know that the best spec is code, have the agent write the spec in code, rewrite the spec in natural language, then iterate.
> Anthropic wants a world where they own your agent where it can't exist outside of the Claude desktop app or Claude Code.
Please. I'm sure you're referring to their locking down of subscription keys, which of course they are going to have restrictions on. It's a subsidized subscription model.
You've always been able to create a platform account and use API keys with usage-based billing, and that will never go away. Charging enough to make a profit on inference isn't exactly rent-seeking or whatever language you want to use to villainize a company trying to make enough revenue to survive.
There was the video a little while back where LTT built a computer for Linus Torvalds and they put an Intel Arc card inside, so I'd imagine Linux support is at the very least, acceptable.
The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product.
All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you.
Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.
Extensible coding agent written in typescript. It’s exactly what you (I’m projecting) want out of Claude Code if you’re okay investing time into building your harness or prompting an agent to build it.
Ya, openclaw is overkill for rewriting a codebase, especially when you're paying API costs.
I developed my own task tracker (github.com/kfcafe/beans), i'm not sure how portable it is; it's been a while since i've used it in claude code. I've been using pi-coding-agent the past few months, highly recommend, it's what's openclaw is built on top of. Anthropic hasn't shut down Oauth, they just say that it's banned outside of Claude Code. I'd recommend installing pi, tell it what you were doing with openclaw and have it port all of the information over to the installation of pi.
you could also check out ralph wiggum loops, could be a good way to rewrite the codebase. just write a prompt describing what you want done, and write a bash loop calling claude's cli pointed at the prompt file. the agent should run on a loop until until you decide to stop it. also not the most efficient usage of tokens, but at least you will be using Claude Pro and not spending money on API calls.
I'm kinda doing this in a back-and-forth way over each section with openclaw, and one nice thing is that I've got it including the chat log for changes with each commit. I'm happy about how it's handled my personality as needing to understand all the changes it's making before committing. So I kind of want something interactive like that -- this isn't a codebase I can trust an LLM to just fire and forget (as evidenced by some massive misunderstandings about rewiring message strings and parameter names like "_meta" and ".meta" and "_META" that meant completely different things which the LLM accidentally crossed and merged at some point, before I caught it and forced it to untangle the whole mess -- which it only did well because there were good logs).
I sort of do need something with persistent memory and personality... or a way to persist it without spending a lot of time trying to bring it back up to speed... it's not exactly specific tasks being tracked, I need it to have a fairly good grasp on the entire ecosystem.
how big is the codebase? how often is the agent writing to memory? you might be able to get away with just appending it to the project's CLAUDE.md? you might also want to check out https://github.com/probelabs/probe
Hm. That looks a lot more granular, which is interesting... I'm not sure it would help me on this.
The codebase is small enough that I can basically go and find all the changes the LLM executed with each request, and read them with a very skeptical eye to verify that they look sane, and ask it why it did something or whether it made a mistake if anything smells wrong. That said, the code I'm rewriting is a genetic algorithm / evaluation engine I wrote years ago, which itself writes code that it then evaluates; so the challenge is having the LLM make changes to the control structure, with the aim of having an agent be able to run the system at high speed and read the result stream through a headless API, without breaking either the writing or evaluation of the code that the codebase itself is writing and running. Openclaw has a surprisingly good handle on this now, after a very very very long running session, but most of the problems I'm hitting still have to do with it not understanding that modifying certain parameters or names could cause downstream effects in the output (eval code) or input (load files) of the system as it's evolving.
Says who? Addiction is never rational, that's what makes it addiction. Ffs.
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