not yet coworkers*

> Give an agent the right interfaces and it becomes less conversational and more ambient. It no longer needs to constantly ask, explain, summarize, and negotiate. It can stay in the background, react to changes, and make steady progress with less supervision and less noise. That is closer to Weiser’s vision: calm technology, but for machines.

I tend to agree quite a bit.

I created a ambient background agent for my projects that does just that.

It is there, in the background, constantly analysing my code and opening PRs to make it better.

The hard part is finding a definition of "better" and for now it is whatever makes the longer and type checker happy.

But overall it is a pleasure to use.

> Agentic management software is all the hype today: What started with Moltbot and OpenClaw now has a lot of competition: ZeroClaw, Hermes, AutoGPT etc.

Moltbot is OpenClaw, AutoGPT was born significantly before. I just couldn’t read after the first paragraph, I’ve lost the trust entirely, whatever/whoever wrote it.

I'd pay more for deterministic, explainable, and fast software without agents. The value of computers is that they do tasks repeatably, reliably, and at blinding speed.

This stuff is negative value.

Ambient agents premise lands and is thought provoking.

But the more you read the article the more the point is lost. The prescriptions given aren't ambient?

    CLI: a good command-line interface makes it easy for an agent loop to interact with your system and saves tokens.
    Specs: Declarative configs, schemas, manifests. Artifacts that state the desired outcome, not the steps.
    Reconciliation loops: you declare the target state, let the system continuously converge toward it. Detect if something drifts.

(seems you're talking to the AI above (and you'll need to refine just like a conversation), it's just not synchronously in chat)

The gripe seems to be specifically with being able to chat with the AI. Yes, ideally the AI just knows to do stuff. But the chat interface is also the reason every Bob and Sarah has chatGPT in their pocket. It's also just growing pains.

I like using them for coding, but I'm wary of making software that depends on an unreliable, expensive remote API. I'd rather have the agent write code and have no runtime dependency.

It might be nice to have something simple and cheap for basic text classification, but I'm not sure what to use. (My websites are written in Deno.)