What Is the Most Minimal Agentic Coder You Can Write?

Yes, it seems to be the same progression. This blog post covers my progression from the minimalist beginnings:

https://benhouston3d.com/blog/building-an-agentic-code-from-...

My chronology can be summarized as:

Phase 1:

- Add async shell commands with input/output/status checking/kill - combines all of the required functionality.

- text editing that can read/write sub-blocks, rather than whole files. But not multiple files yet (but I can look into that now.)

- Add fetch

- Add browser tools with async input/output

- Add sub-agents (to reduce context, send them on research tasks or other sub-tasks to report back.)

Phase 2:

- Github mode (basically prompt it to use git and gh cli tools in its workflows)

- Github action integration (run automatically on the cloud in response to triggers)

- Token caching (reduce costs by 80%)

I will check out your planning stage. I've been having my tool run off GitHub issues so I get it to write a plan there and then implement, which is sort of the same thing in a way.

In RA.Aid (https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid) we support normal tool calling, but we also have a our own agent backend called Code Is All You Need.

The way it works is we prompt the LLM to generate code to call the tools directly. We then parse the AST to validate it and restrict it to a very small/safe subset (whitelisted function calls.)

HF smolagents does something similar and there are a few papers out there validating the approach.

That makes sense because Cline existed prior to tool use being part of the standard LLM APIs. I think OpenAI had it at that point, but Anthropic and Ollama hasn't yet standardized on an API.

But the vendors are training their models specifically on tool use with their expected internal formats so you might as well leverage that if you are starting fresh now.

Posts that fall off the front page have a chance to re-appear on the front page a few days later.

Anyways, back to the actual content: my current best agent framework is about 500 lines or 20 kb of python, a large part of that is strings of instructions for various stages of development.

Like you, I start with a system prompt about "you will be given a programming project description, please write a full attempt at the project and we will execute and provide results", then extract the code, run it, copy the console output or error to the script, and ask if the project description is fully satisfied, looping until it judges that the project is fully complete.

I do also have some minified versions that are around 60-70 LOC, but at this point, my interest is shifting to more features that are still implemented simply and modularly. For example, I'd like to be able to manage multi-file projects, allow the LLM to test interactive CLI programs, implement a backup and rollback system for when the LLM seems to get stuck and unable to produce a functioning build or has a major regression, implement git repos, implement web browsing (for coding documentation research) and GUI development with playwright and a local multimodal model, and ideally be able to tell my computer to work on a project while I'm in the office or asleep, and wake up the next day to a significantly improved complex project, ideally eventually getting it able to work on itself and developing its own automated developer, using entire programming projects of increasing complexity as test cases, measuring how quickly a framework can accomplish a task of a given difficulty, and optimize for increasing how quickly it can reliably develop complex applications.

Some of my test projects include:

Write a script to interact with an LLM API endpoint at localhost:123/v1/

Write a python script to get the public IP and local weather using free APIs

Stuff like that.

I could share some of my agent frameworks with you when I get home tonight if you'd like.

IIUC, someone (dang?) can give a post a second chance.

But the way the software does it involves changing the apparent timestamps.

(It will also claim that people made comments when they didn't, which is problematic -- from potentially making it look like someone was goofing off when they were supposed to be crunching at work, to making it look like they said something after they'd already changed their mind based on new information, to potential legal problems when someone appears to be speaking on a topic during a period they aren't allowed to.)

This likely means that somebody else submitted your URL 2 hours ago. HN translates duplicate submissions into upvotes.

I wouldn't be surprised if HN weights resubmission more strongly than simple upvotes since it's a much stronger indication of interest.

Might have been resurfaced by a mod to give it a second chance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309