[theptip]

They may seem like small details, but I think a couple novel design decisions are going to prove to be widely adopted and revolutionary.

The biggest one (as Karpathy notes) is having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each.

Call it “Claude native development” if you will, but “fork and customize” instead of batteries-included platforms/frameworks is going to be a big shift when it percolates through the ecosystem.

A bunch of things you need to figure out, eg how do you ship a spec for how to test and validate the thing, make it secure, etc.

How long before OSs start evolving in this way? You can imagine Auto research-like sharing and promotion upstream of good fixes/approaches, but a more heterogenous ecosystem could be more resistant to attacks if each instance had a strong immune system.

[vova_hn2]

> having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each

I'm not sure what is the advantage. Each user will have to waste time and tokens for the same task, instead of doing it once and and shipping to everyone.

[theptip]

Here is my take -

Old world - each platform writes APIs and then has to publish rich client libraries. Despite the server APIs theoretically being well documented, because users want the quickest time-to-first-demo platforms also ship a bunch of client code. This may bring in dependencies you don’t care for, or otherwise have a wide attack surface.

New world - platforms publish good REST APIs and specs, and Claude can trivially implement the client that is idiomatic for your own app deployment. Within Nanoclaw you don’t even need to handle eg streaming APIs if you only need a simple poll on one endpoint, even though the server (and official client library) might support them. In the best case, this can keep your app more secure.

Of course, the tradeoff/risk is that an individual implementation might be broken. So right now I’m not convinced it’s a win. But I generally buy that it’ll be possible to maintain a high enough security bar within the next year or two.

The time and token cost is probably seconds and cents already, I don’t buy that one.

[verdverm]

Agreement, excellence in one domain does not confer it to others. If you've ever worked with researchers, you know for the most part they are not engineers. This is bad advice / prediction by people with hammers imo.

OCI is a good choice of reuse, they aren't having the agent reimplement that. When there is an existing SDK, no sense in rebuilding that either. Code you don't use should be compiled away anyhow.

[altruios]

Except it's not 'once' though.

In order for it to be 'once': all hardware must have been, currently be, and always will be: interchangeable. As well as all OS's. That's simply not feasible.

[vova_hn2]

I don't see, how is it relevant in this case. We are talking about writing an integration with an HTTP API (probably) in a high level language (TS/JS, Python, etc). We have already abstracted hardware away.

[primer42]

I get the appeal but I disagree

The strength of open source software is collaboration. That many people have tried it, read it, submitted fixes and had those fixes reviewed and accepted.

We've all seen LLMs spit out garbage bugs on the first few tries. I've written garbage bugs on my first try too. We all benefit from the review process.

I would rather have a battle tested base to start customizing from than having to stumble through the pitfalls of a buggy or insecure AI implementation.

[eli]

Troubleshooting "works on my machine" issues most be fun when no two people have exactly the same implementation.

Also seems like this will further entrench the top 2 or 3 models. Use something else and your software stack looks different.

[theptip]

> We've all seen LLMs spit out garbage bugs on the first few tries.

I’m assuming here an extrapolation of capabilities where Claude is competitive to the median OSS contributor for the off-the-shelf libraries you’d be comparing with.

As with most of the Clawd ecosystem, for now it probably is best considered an art project / prototype (or a security dumpster fire for the non-technical users adopting it).

> The strength of open source software is collaboration. That many people have tried it, read it, submitted fixes and had those fixes reviewed and accepted

I do think that there is room for much more granular micro-libraries that can be composed, rather than having to pull in a monolithic dependency for your need. Agents can probably vet a 1k microlibrary BoM in a way a human could never have the patience to.

(This is more the NPM way, leftpad etc, which is again a security issue in the current paradigm, but potentially very different ROI in the agent ecosystem.)

[tmaly]

I have thought of this ship a spec concept. What is we are just trading markdown files instead of code files to implement some feature into our system?

[TYPE_FASTER]

I wish I could find the GitHub repo, but yes, I have seen at least one library written in Markdown to be used with Claude. Not a Claude skill, but functionality to be delivered.