Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aadyachinubhai 78 days ago
Most agents are prompt + a bunch of tool calls. Writing everything in one prompt is like writing your entire app in one function. It works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you have no idea where it broke. Orbit gives you steps and python control flow instead of prompts, so failures are local, models are swappable, and budgets are per-action. This makes it debuggable.

For example, Your `Read` step failed after 3 LLM calls on step 4 of 7. With a monolithic prompt, that's just... it hung.
1 comments
dpark2026 78 days ago
But, it seems like that's a simple implementation of a particular framework? I mean, I think they do more than just take a prompt and execute tool calls? But, I appreciate the response and time. Thanks!
link
aadyachinubhai 78 days ago
Fair, mature frameworks do a lot more. Orbit isn't trying to out-feature them. It's a thinner abstraction specifically for computer-use, where the bottleneck isn't orchestration complexity, it's controllability at the step level. Different problem.
link