I’m playing with this exact concept but going down the path of a Claude code plugin that is optimized for configuring lowdefy apps because of that framework’s unique approach where you don’t write code you generate yaml configs that then drive the rendering of an app. So far it’s working pretty well, still pressure testing it. The audit control and permissions management you have is great, especially around the connectors. Nice job!
Thanks! We've actually have been experimenting with the config generation approach as well. One tradeoff we noticed was it turns the system into more of an app builder where the ceiling of what you can do is lower compared to a coding agent. But it's much faster than codegen. How dynamic have you found Lowdefy compared to codegen?
I just redid my homelab/media server (switched from an old NUC I couldn’t figure out how to stop overheating even with some decent modification work, now using an hp elitedesk with an i5 processor that is handling my stack nicely). Thinking about setting up a vm on the base ubuntu install for isolation to run Claude in. May play with dispatch, may just put raw Claude code then use Moshi app on my iPhone and iPad.
Those 3 statements only work if you have short-term thinking. For example, there's no taking into account the gradual atrophy in skills that come from excessive tool use.
To use an analogy, imagine you are fluent in reading/writing/speaking a foreign language. Over time, if you don't regularly use that foreign language, or you use a tool to translate to that foreign language, you gradually lose fluency in that language. It may be more efficient for a translator to use a tool like Google Translate or similar to translate between languages, but there are clearly downsides to doing so, and proofreading the produced contents is not enough to compensate for those downsides, as reading what someone/something else wrote is easier than writing it yourself.
Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
I've even seen communities that are literally centered around an old school forum open an official discord either builds a clique or drains people away from the forum - both of which will kill the forum eventually.
Nice job, clean and well built. I built something very similar, with a focus on engineering/product/startup blogs https://engineered.at
What's your tech stack? Mine is pretty vanilla ruby on rails, while my site is closed source, I did open source a rails engine for adaptive monitoring of RSS feeds that does a lot of the heavy lifting: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
It would be interesting to extract devices and inventions from articles to create an "inventions race" (as opposed to "arms race.") It could be used to establish prior-art and negate a lot of expensive and unnecessary patents that end up going nowhere or used for trolling. That's something I have been thinking about for tinkeri.ng. Something comparable to a patent archive - but used for networking and sharing. Would end up looking like a wiki with articles getting pingbacks.
It’s funny, sites like these are so divisive. I’ve gotten as many “do not llm summarize anything for me” as I’ve gotten “this is super handy!” responses. I like them, so I’m keeping them.
Interesting idea overall. Could be generalized to just general trend identification I think based on named entity recognition (like google trends). Over time you can trace first mentions of stuff and buzz over time. I’ll noodle on it.
Yep, you could have an options menu (like at hcker.news) and have the ability to switch the summaries off or even extend them? Could also make them blacker and larger?
Also, looks like ArticlesBase stopped in 2024 - maybe offer a way for users to upload articles, summarize them and then people can micropay to read? Maybe just charge for older articles? Can also charge for extra long articles? Put everything into an LLM?
I’ve been noodling on an idea sort of similar, which is to have a system where if you register for an account and very your site (with a technical mechanism in place to enforce that), you get a slight boost in the ranking algorithm for your content. Then, if you pay a small monthly fee, you get an additional boost in rankings, as well as some amount of (anonymized appropriately) analytics about your content performance on the site. Not sure if anyone would ever want to use that and I don’t have anywhere near the traffic for that to be worth it yet, but seems worth playing with.
I also want to add content digests/newsletters that highlights best content of the week for sharing on twitter and via email to those who register accounts. Typical growth marketing stuff
Regarding Wordpress, I've found it still lacks a decent search plugin. Could you make one? Charge for it, accept outside pings, take in full feeds and provide a search box in return for subsequent display on individual sites.
Also, pitch your aggregator as well as something that'll "pull in more engaged readers into your site." Perhaps the search box could be "search this site only" / "search all engineered blogs."
You could also make the plugin free, but charge for accepting more than 10(?) pings per month. If you create a specialized LLM, you could also offer some type of shared ownership too to encourage cooperation.
Crowdsourcing content is another interesting area to watch where writers propose an article and it gets funded beforehand. Those articles could end up being open-source ideas with actionable information. Having built up a reputation and readership would make successful crowdfunding more likely.
very interesting ideas, thanks for the detail. I'll think about the wordpress search plugin idea. here's my twitter handle if you want to connect and chat there: https://x.com/iamdchuk
Some other ideas I've thought about:
- Pay to boost a specific article for a period of time (with appropriate UI changes so people know it's a boosted article)
- A job board that puts roles in the article rankings (ideally also semantically matched to users based on their profile/topics they follow). a reverse job board could work too, where people can indicate the types of roles they're open to
- An Offers board, for people to pay to advertise their product / startup with a specialized deal available to readers of the site (could also be more of an affiliate system to reduce friction of getting Offers submitted by taking a commission on payments collected using the offer code).
Overall there's a bunch of directions this could go, I just need to start promoting the site itself to get traffic up and consistent.
Ha funny, I was speccing out an idea for real time Claude code interaction from local apps using some tricks vs using the agent sdk when I got the popup to try Fable. So of course I gave it a go, and it triggered the sensitive content warning immediately, which I was very confused by until I put two and two together.
Fun times when “safety” means both the safety of mankind, and also the safety of revenues
I’ve been using this general pattern - a custom cli app for deterministic tasks, skills for the agent harness, run the skills in the agent and it produces artifacts for you by using the cli and its own agentic reasoning - a lot lately for work. Things like “give me an executive brief of the activity in these teams backlogs over the last month” and in 5-10 minutes I have a few page doc I can read that is cited with the tickets it analyzed and I don’t have to go bug people or ask them to do yet another task for me, just make sure your backlog is updated and detailed like normal practice. It’s awesome and really fits a useful spot between pure agent usage (which is hard to get consistent results from on repeat tasks) and not having to build/buy a full blown app for every random thing.
This approach works well, I agree. But I keep wishing that I could invert it. The architecture I feel like I keep yearning for, is a traditional CLI program that encodes most workflow knowledge/decisions as real code; but which does "just a little bit of coding agent invocation" during one specific workflow step.
Not sure how to accomplish this. Anyone have any suggestions? Are there libraries for this yet? (And how would they even work? It feels like, to do this right, there would have to be some background service that CLI software could expect to interact with via a well-known local IPC socket — similar to how e.g. the docker daemon works. But I'm unaware of any coding agent software/frameworks that expose such an IPC capability...)
I’m building this! It was originally designed for human accessibility for interactive CLIs, but it turned out to be really useful for giving agents the ability to follow structured workflows.
It runs as a background terminal that the agent can observe, and then exposes all interaction options as structured commands that can be run from the foreground CLI which then update the state of the background terminal via IPC. My hope is to establish a sort of “ARIA for terminals” standard to improve accessibility for both humans and agents. Email in profile, ping me if you’re interested in giving it a spin (just have plugins for Inquirer + Commander right now, hoping to broaden to other frameworks & TUIs soon).
I reverted this due to impending billing changes, but Claude and most LLM providers to my knowledge do offer a way to directly fire a prompt to the LLM in a "headless" or non-interactive mode. Specifically "claude -p <your_prompt_here>" is the way to do it with Claude Code. It allows for using the agent to do a one-off command with a given structured prompt. Originally Lathe would use this from the Go application to allow you to extend a tutorial directly from the UI without directly interacting with the LLM.
You'd have to exec out, so it's alittle clunkier than an IPC, but I think you could achieve what you want with it.
But in my experience, to actually get where they're going quickly (as opposed to spending hours and hundreds of dollars stumbling around in the dark), coding agents generally need more interactive hand-holding than that. If you just fire off one non-interactive session and wait for it to come to a stop, the problem usually isn't fully+correctly solved at the point at the LLM decides to "finish." And if you then start another non-interactive session to continue the work, the new session will have lost the old session's state/memory/context, and so will stumble through many of the same mistakes / misapprehensions.
What you really want, for a CLI program with a "use coding agent to do X" workflow-step, is for the CLI program to play the role of a human in a temporary durable coding-agent conversation session: prompting the agent; then waiting for it to finish responding (and side-effecting); then either asking the agent itself to evaluate an "am I done yet" predicate with a constrained output syntax; or having the CLI program do its own out-of-band validation of the changes made to the shared state by the agent; where, in either case, if the agent isn't "done yet", then the workflow step must continue poking it — or prompt the human to make a decision on how to proceed (possibly involving providing direct input to the LLM, but this is not ideal; ideally the CLI "abstracts away" the need for the end-user to understand the intricacies of the conversation the program is having with the LLM. Even more ideally, the conversation just whizzes by and the human doesn't have to think about an LLM being involved at all.)
Basically, think of this not as the CLI program saying to an agent "answer me this question" or "edit this file for me", but rather, the CLI program popping open a mini "guided + 99%-of-the-time automated" TUI coding-agent micro-IDE "inside" the workflow, in about the same way that git pops open your EDITOR inside `git commit`.
> Basically, think of this not as the CLI program saying to an agent "answer me this question" or "edit this file for me", but rather, the CLI program popping open a mini "guided + 99%-of-the-time automated" TUI coding-agent micro-IDE "inside" the workflow, in about the same way that git pops open your EDITOR inside `git commit`.
Isn't this simply having your mechanistic script call `claude "Prompt that is well honed to provide a mini, guided, 99%-of-the-time automated LLM action to $THE_THING"`? And, possibly including some `--allowed-tools`?
I agree! I want to say I first saw this pattern in some work Simon Willison did (Rodney and Showboat). For certain workflows the pair of Skills + CLI give me a nice balance between the flexibility of LLMs and the consistency of a CLI.
Can you give some examples of the deterministic tasks? So in your example, was the deterministic task “fetch this team’s backlog”? And then the LLM parts are “process each backlog” and “combine a summary”?
Generally it’s things like that yes, but also stuff like preparing the pulled content to be summarized and then taking those summary batches and preparing for synthesis in a templated format
I backed jetkvm on kickstarter or indiegogo or whatever site they launched on out of excitement. It’s a well made device, the software is clean. It feels like it’s stopped being iterated on though which is a bummer (the tariff timing was likely brutal).
Even though I have it on Ethernet on a gigabit network at home, with WiFi 7 mesh that gets 950mb up/down to the internet, I’ve never been able to use jetkvm whether through their cloud portal or through direct ip connection without it feeling very sluggish. It’s plugged into an aging NUC that I know is still performant, and I previously had no machine setup with settings configured to a smooth basically realtime feel even over Tailscale remotely, so I don’t know if I just am using the wrong settings or something or what. Might just have to have codex computer use fiddle with it to see if it can figure it out.
Been using his skills a lot lately, they are wonderful. I’ve added an issue to specs skill that grounds the issues with a technical plan against the current codebase, and a research school that spawns a bunch of agents to look up best practices on the internet for those issues with specs, it really dials things in. I need to issue a PR to his project for those two…
