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by Myrmornis 113 days ago
Most of what the article says is true regarding coding agents, but articles like this are making a big mistake: they're completely forgetting that agentic applications aren't all claude code.

We're entering an era where many organisations will have agentic loops running in their own backends. There's a spectrum of constraint that can be applied to these apps -- at one end claude code running unsandboxed on your laptop with all permissions off able to cook up anything it wants with bash and whatever CLIs and markdown skill documents are available, and at the other end an agentic loop running in the backend of a bank or other traditionally conservative "enterprise"/corporate organisation. Engineering teams working in that latter category are going to want to expose their own networked services to the agentic app, but they're going to want to do so in a controlled manner. And a JSON-RPC API with clearly defined single-purpose tool-calling endpoints is far, far closer to what they're looking for than the ability for the agent to do wtf it wants by using bash to script its own invocation of executables.
1 comments
mdemare 113 days ago
Sure, but it's pretty trivial to generate a CLI application that talks to that API.

That's how I let agents access my database too. Letting them access psql is a recipe for disaster, but a CLI executable that contains the credentials, and provides access to a number of predefined queries and commands? That's pretty convenient.

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Myrmornis 112 days ago
Yes. But are you letting your agent make the decision of when and how to call that CLI? And presumably you're invoking it via the Bash tool. In which case your agent is free to write ad-hoc bash orchestration around your CLI calls. And perhaps you don't just have one such CLI but rather N for N different services.

And so we've arrived at the world of ad-hoc on-the-fly bash scripting that teams writing backend agentic applications in more "traditional"/conservative companies are not going to want.

Don't get me wrong, it's great for claude-code-type local computer automation use cases -- I do the same as you there.

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