693 karma · joined April 23, 2021
HP(11) > Shopify(2) > Dutchie(3)
campbel.at.hn
subjective systems become politicized
pick your poison
Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.
I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.
> It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.
I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".
TL;DR you can run some of your infra in local-dev that provide parity with your production environment.
> An agent is an AI model configured with instructions, tools, guardrails, handoffs and more.
Agents can hand off to other agents, but even the hand-off is decided by the agent itself, not a pre-defined orchestration.
Agentic systems can be simply the LLM + prompting + tools[1]. LLMs are more than capable (especially chain-of thought models) to breakdown problems into steps, analyze necessary tools to use and then executing the steps in sequence. All of this is done with the model in the driver seat.
I think the system described in the post need a different name. It's a traditional workflow system with an agent operating on individual tasks. Its more rigid in that the workflow is setup ahead of time. Typical agentic systems are largely undefined or defined via prompting. For some use cases this rigidity is a feature.
[1 https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...
This might be satisfying if you have a grievance with the "institution" but to OP's point its also interesting because we often limit our areas of exploration to what is conventionally accepted. If you are ignorant of convention you are more likely to retread ground, but less likely to be bounded by it. As you say, conventional wisdom is conventional because its pretty dang good, so this doesn't often pay off.
If you are building your own applications, you can simply use "Tools APIs" provided by the LLM directly (e,.g. https://platform.openai.com/docs/assistants/tools).
MCP is not something most people need to bother with unless you are building an application that needs extension or you are trying to extend an application (like those I listed above). Under the hood the MCP is just an interface into the tools API.