alt Hacker NewsI'm not in the tech industry. Could someone explain why there are so many new coding agents, and why they're commonly upvoted on HackerNews? It seems like there's a new one in the top 10 every other day.
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Because a lot of people are writing their own to get a tool that they understand and can manipulate as they like. So they like to share them and see what other people have done to learn from. As a community we are still very far from coming to a consensus on what a good harness looks like and the only way, IMO, to get a good feel for it is to write your own.
It's basically just a relatively simple to create piece of software that's important to get right (since you use it so much), can be made by many different design philosophies (maximal vs. minimal, customizability, etc.), and has very few good standards around it as of yet.
Hacker news generally follows trends, and this is the current trend.
The discussion around coding agents nowadays is steering towards harnesses (which is probably a better description of what this is). "Agent" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting and has become a bit of a catch-all term to describe a model + harness + tooling + prompt + some other things that I've probably not thought about. The harness is a part that's being explored more as many believe it's where we can get some better performance out of the models.
This one in particular is from Vercel who provide a service to use models, so they have a vested interest in providing a harness.
Because we're actively exploring the best way to remove any need to deal with code, and make it so that you don't need any real talent to make a computer do things for anyone.
We haven't quite hit on the right formula yet, but people are very excited by the possibility.
Because we are in a gold rush and the best thing to sell are the shovels.
It's a brand new type of software. Nobody knows what the best way to do it is so a lot of people are trying stuff out, and a lot of people are interested in new ideas.
Because they're valueless and trivial to produce, but trends are gonna trend.
It's a delicate mix of providing good system prompts, tools, workflows for agents, extensibility etc. I've used several and have yet to find the one that fits exactly how I want to work.
Another cause of coding harness inflation is that every model provider release their own coding agent, optimised for their models.
> Why there are so many new coding agents, and why they're commonly upvoted on HackerNews? It seems like there's a new one in the top 10 every other day.
It is widely known that upvote rings happen on this site.
When a new technique or capability arrives on the tech scene, there's a point in the invention-to-diffusion story when the new thing becomes accessible (e.g. cheap and/or easy) enough for a broader audience of developers to experiment with it... but before anyone's figured out best practices, let alone polished products/projects, or calcified around a market leader.
So you get a Cambrian explosion of weird little projects. Ultimately, one of them will probably become the "market" leader... or at least the market default.
Right now there's a lot of agent harnesses and sandbox projects floating about.
Fun examples from the past: text editors, window managers, IRC clients, blogging engines (first static, then dynamic, then static again), Twitter clients... every programming language community has weird clusters of library/framework duplication in their history...
Sometimes these projects take on a rite of passage flavour... like, as every Jedi builds their own lightsaber, every developer builds their own... blog? That used to be the obvious one. Less so these days.