… aaaaand we’re back, ladies and gentlemen! That was a nice three week break and I’ve thought quite a bit about what to do with this newsletter when I come back to it.
The result: I’m going to double down on having fun with it. I think I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut, after trying to follow the recipe every week for years.
I don’t know what that means exactly, but hey, you’ve been warned.
We released Agents in Orbs this week. This has been a long time in the making and now it’s finally out and people are already starting to say “in an orb” as if it’s a common phrase, I love it. I truly believe that remote agent— excuse me: agents in orbs, will play a big role in the future. Why? One reason is that these models are incredible when thrown into a sandbo— I’m sorry: an orb. I mean, look at this. There aren’t any magic strings being pulled behind the curtain. If there’s ffmpeg, a model will find a way. These agents need less and less handholding and that includes the handholding by a bespoke development setup. They’re productive in these remote machines. The second reason is that something changes when you can start many agents in many different orbs in parallel. I tried to articulate that in that post up there but based on the conversations I had in response, I think it’s something you really have to try for yourself. But I can add that the more I use agents in orbs, the more I believe that thinking of remote agents as “agents that I can remote control on a different machine that’s similar to my local machine” is the wrong way to look at it. The fact that the orbs are ephemeral changes what you do and how you do it. Just like switching from a single build server to a build system with VMs changes things. State is no longer an issue. Resources and runtime is no longer an issue. These agents in orbs now look like async functions to me, less like remote controlled agents. Async is the point. I now often end prompts with “… and now run all the tests, fix all the bugs you run into, then push” and then switch to another agent. It’s very, very interesting and exciting to try to get them to do more and more in orbs and see how it changes your interaction with agents.
