[burntcaramel]

WebAssembly is particularly attractive for agentic coding because prompting it to write Zig or C is no harder than prompting it to write JavaScript. So you can get the authoring speed of a scripting language via LLMs but the performance close to native via wasm.

This is the approach I’m using for my open source project qip that lets you pipeline wasm modules together to process text, images & data: https://github.com/royalicing/qip

qip modules follow a really simple contract: there’s some input provided to the WebAssembly module, and there’s some output it produces. They can’t access fs/net/time. You can pipe in from your other CLIs though, e.g. from curl.

I have example modules for markdown-to-html, bmp-to-ico (great for favicons), ical events, a basic svg rasterizer, and a static site builder. You compose them together and then can run them on the command line, in the browser, or in the provided dev server. Because the module contract is so simple they’ll work on native too.

[skybrian]

An advantage of running a coding agent in a VM is that to answer your question, it can install arbitrary software into the VM. (For example, running apt-get or using curl to install a specialized tool.) WebAssembly seems suitable for more specialized agents where you already know what software it will need?