top | item 43485173

(no title)

janpaul123 | 11 months ago

JP here! Would love to answer your questions!

We listed a bunch of ideas for larger improvements in the blog: Instant app; Up-to-date docs; Prompt/product-first workflows; Browser IDE; Local/on-prem models; Live collaboration; Parallel-agents; Code variants; Shared context; Open source sharing; MCP marketplace; Integrated CI; Monitoring/production agents; Security agents; Sketching..

What would you like us to build?

discuss

order

arevno|11 months ago

The obvious thing would be LSP interrogation, which would allow the token context to be significantly smaller than entire files. If you have one file open, and you are working on a function that calls out to N other modules, instead of packing the context with N files, you get ONLY the sections of those files the LSP tells you to look at.

janpaul123|11 months ago

Yes! This is high on our list. Context window compression is a big deal, and this is one of the main ways to do it, IMO.

Have you tried any tools that do this particularly well?

amarant|11 months ago

One thing that I think would be cool, and that could perhaps be good starting point, is a TDD agent. How I imagine this working:

User (who is a developer) writes tests, and a description of the desired application. The agent attempts to build the application, compiles the code, runs the tests, and automatically feeds any compiler errors and test failures back to agent so that it can fix it's own mistakes without input of the user.

Based on my experience of current programming agents, I imagine it'll take the agent a couple of attempts to get an application that compiles and passes all the tests. What would be really great to see is an agent (with a companion application probably) that automates all those retries in a good way.

i imagine the hardest parts will be to interpret compiler output, and (this is where things get real tricky) test output, and how to translate that into code changes in the existing code base.

janpaul123|11 months ago

Yeah, this is a great workflow! What's more, agents are particularly good at writing tests, since they're simpler and mostly linear, so they can even help with that part.

As to your point of automating retries, with my last prototype I played a lot with having agents do multiple parallel implementations, and then pick the first one that works, or lets you choose (or even have another agent choose).

Have you tried any tools that have this workflow down, or at least approach it?

999900000999|11 months ago

This is going to sound a bit odd, but I suggest you detail what your tools do well and what they struggle with. For example I love Haxe, which is a niche programming language primarily for game development.

The vast majority of the time I try to use an llm with it, the code is essentially useless as it will try to invent methods that don't even exist.

For example if you're coding agents are really only good at JavaScript and a little bit of python, tell me that front and center.

janpaul123|11 months ago

Good point! In that sense we're similar to most AI coding agents in that the languages we do well are the languages the mainstream LLMs do well. We might zoom in and add really good support for particular languages though (not decided yet), in which case we'll def mention that front and center!

Have you found any LLMs or coding agents that work well with Haxe? It might be a bit too niche for us (again, not sure yet), but I'd be very curious to see what they do well!

eutropia|11 months ago

Local Agent, 100%.

If I'm just exploring ideas for fun or scratching my own itch, I have no desire to be thinking about a continuous stream of expenditure happening in the background when I have an apple silicon mac with 64GB of ram fully capable of running an agentic stack with tool calling etc.

Please make it trivial to setup and use a llamafile or similar as the LLM for this.

janpaul123|11 months ago

I agree, this would be good to have soon, especially as good models keep getting smaller, and hardware keeps getting cheaper.

spankalee|11 months ago

Your timeline is indeed crazy fast. Did you recruit the 9 others in your first week? Did you pitch and secure funding in that week too? reply

janpaul123|11 months ago

In roughly the last 2 weeks, yes. It helped that everyone involved also activated their network, so we got a multiplicative effect. Can't speak to funding for now unfortunately.