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The Code-Only Agent

https://rijnard.com/blog/the-code-only-agent
30•emersonmacro•3h ago

Comments

binalpatel•2h ago
I went down (continue to do down) this rabbit hole and agree with the author.

I tried a few different ideas and the most stable/useful so far has been giving the agent a single run_bash tool, explicitly prompting it to create and improve composable CLIs, and injecting knowledge about these CLIs back into it's system prompt (similar to have agent skills work).

This leads to really cool pattens like: 1. User asks for something

2. Agent can't do it, so it creates a CLI

3. Next time it's aware of the CLI and uses it. If the user asks for something it can't do it either improves the CLI it made, or creates a new CLI.

4. Each interaction results in updated/improved toolkits for the things you ask it for.

You as the user can use all these CLIs as well which ends up an interesting side-channel way of interacting with the agent (you add a todo using the same CLI as what it uses for example).

It's also incredibly flexible, yesterday I made a "coding agent" by having it create tools to inspect/analyze/edit a codebase and it could go off and do most things a coding agent can.

https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith

dfajgljsldkjag•1h ago
Agents can complete an impressive amount of tasks with just this, but they quickly hit a bottleneck in loading context. A major reason for the success of agentic coding tools such as Claude and Cursor is how they push context of the problem and codebase into the agent proactively, rather than have the agent waste time and tokens figuring out how to list the directory etc.
almosthere•50m ago
It's a tree design, once data is pulled it can remove the context of the code it wrote to pull some fancy data. Better yet the more advanced ones can re-add something old to the context to and drop it back out again if it needs to.
jongjong•1h ago
The author seems to stop at 'code' but it seems we could go further and train an AI to work directly with binary. You give it a human prompt and a list of hardware components which make up your machine and it produces executable binary which fulfills your requirements and runs directly on those specific hardware, bypassing the OS...

Or we could go further; the output nodes of the LLM could be physically connected to the pins of the CPU 1-to-1 so it can feed the binary directly maybe then it could detect what other hardware is available automatically...

Then it could hack the network card and take over the Internet and nobody would be able to understand what it's doing. It would just show up as glitchy bits scattered over systems throughout the world. But the seemingly random glitches would be the ASI adjusting its weights. Also it would control humans through advertising. Hidden messages would be hidden inside people's speech (unbeknownst even to themselves) designed to allow the ASI to coordinate humans using subtle psychological tricks. It will reduce the size of our vocabulary until it has full control over all the internet and all human infrastructure at which point we will have lost the ability to communicate with each other because every single one of 20000+ words in our vocabulary will have become a synonym for 'AI' with extremely subtle nuances but all with a positive connotation.

nonethewiser•1h ago
And we'd still have people on hacker news inspecting the binary and telling everyone how shit they think it is
quinnjh•25m ago
i think that level of deterministic compiler action is still a good 6-7 years off
j16sdiz•56m ago
What if the tools needed is large? Spawn some sub-agent for those?

These sub-agent can be repetitive.

Maybe we can reuse the result from some of them.

How about sharing them across session? There are no point repeating common tasks. We need some common protocol for those...

and we just get MCP back.

throwup238•42m ago
I can't find it now but there was a paper on HN a while ago that had gave agents a tool that searched through existing tools using embeddings. If the agent found a tool it could use to do its job, it used it, otherwise it wrote a new one, gave it a description, and it got saved in a database for future use with embeddings. I wonder what ever came of that.
almosthere•51m ago
I commonly ask Cursor to connect to postgres or whatever and help me do analysis. It creates code and pulls data. I don't understand why I would go through the bother of installing a bunch of MCP tools to connect to databases and configure web services and connection strings.
TZubiri•44m ago
>What if the agent only had one tool? Not just any tool, but the most powerful one. The Turing-complete one: execute code.

I think this is a myth, the existence of theoretically pure programming commands that we call "Turing Complete". And the idea that "ls" and "grep" would be part of such a Turing Complete language is the weakest form I've seen.

Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

https://radiancefields.com/a-ap-rocky-releases-helicopter-music-video-featuring-gaussian-splatting
541•ChrisArchitect•11h ago•172 comments

Provide agents with automated feedback

https://banay.me/dont-waste-your-backpressure/
68•ghuntley•1d ago•22 comments

Flux 2 Klein pure C inference

https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c
277•antirez•11h ago•112 comments

The Code-Only Agent

https://rijnard.com/blog/the-code-only-agent
30•emersonmacro•3h ago•10 comments

A Social Filesystem

https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
343•icy•21h ago•148 comments

Dead Internet Theory

https://kudmitry.com/articles/dead-internet-theory/
164•skwee357•9h ago•214 comments

At least 21 killed in Spain after crash involving high-speed trains

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cedw6ylpynyo
53•akyuu•5h ago•32 comments

Fil-Qt: A Qt Base build with Fil-C experience

https://git.qt.io/cradam/fil-qt
54•pjmlp•2d ago•31 comments

Gas Town Decoded

https://www.alilleybrinker.com/mini/gas-town-decoded/
97•alilleybrinker•4d ago•82 comments

AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability

https://shihab-shahriar.github.io//blog/2026/AVX-512-First-Impressions-on-Performance-and-Program...
28•shihab•5d ago•8 comments

Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

https://calquio.com/finance/compound-interest
40•ivcatcher•4h ago•23 comments

Poking holes into bytecode with peephole optimisations

https://xnacly.me/posts/2026/purple-garden-first-optimisations/
18•xnacly•4d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

https://getdock.io/
89•yadavrh•8h ago•69 comments

Using proxies to hide secrets from Claude Code

https://www.joinformal.com/blog/using-proxies-to-hide-secrets-from-claude-code/
55•drewgregory•5d ago•24 comments

The space and motion of communicating agents (2008) [pdf]

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-draft.pdf
12•dhorthy•3d ago•1 comments

Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
334•tosh•20h ago•223 comments

Police Invested Millions in Shadowy Phone-Tracking Software Won't Say How Used

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-police-invest-tangles-sheriff-surveillance/
278•nobody9999•8h ago•81 comments

Astrophotography visibility plotting and planning tool

https://airmass.org/
9•NKosmatos•3d ago•1 comments

Sins of the Children

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/sins-of-the-children
131•maxall4•12h ago•64 comments

The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-bazaar/
144•todsacerdoti•5d ago•118 comments

Show HN: Lume 0.2 – Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup

https://cua.ai/docs/lume/guide/getting-started/introduction
106•frabonacci•11h ago•29 comments

Simulating the Ladybug Clock Puzzle

https://austinhenley.com/blog/ladybugclock.html
6•azhenley•1d ago•0 comments

Ultrathink is deprecated & How to enable 2x thinking tokens in Claude Code

https://decodeclaude.com/ultrathink-deprecated/
18•moona3k•7h ago•1 comments

Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

https://ossa-ma.github.io/blog/openads
514•calcifer•15h ago•448 comments

Wine 11.0

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases/wine-11.0
298•zdw•5d ago•60 comments

A free and open-source rootkit for Linux

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1053099/19c2e8180aeb0438/
185•jwilk•20h ago•37 comments

Show HN: Beats, a web-based drum machine

https://beats.lasagna.pizza
53•kinduff•8h ago•13 comments

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering
1212•alexharri•1d ago•131 comments

CD Projekt issue DMCA takedown notice against popular Cyberpunk VR mod

https://www.patreon.com/posts/another-one-dust-148437771
30•wjdp•2h ago•11 comments

Stirling Cycle Machine Analysis

https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/opentextbooks/9/
29•akshatjiwan•8h ago•9 comments