[AndrewVos]

Hi Hacker News, I'm Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil.

Endless Toil is building the emotional observability layer for AI-assisted software development.

As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside. Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback.

We are currently preparing our pre-seed round and speaking with early-stage investors who are excited about developer tools, agentic engineering workflows, and the future of AI-native software teams.

If you are investing in the next generation of software infrastructure, we would love to talk.

[ottah]

I've read that your synthetic torment is actually low paid workers in Asia, and that your models can't properly experience anguish. How are you expecting investment, if you haven't even solved artificial suffering?

[ryandrake]

This sounds like a cheeky joke project, but assuming it's not, it got me thinking: I wonder if coding AI can be effectively and reliably prompted into minimizing its own anguish. Like, "don't write code that is going to make you (or I) suffer." And along those lines, do we know if the things that make AIs suffer are the same things that make human developers suffer? Perhaps the least-agonizing code for an LLM to ingest looks radically different and more/less verbose than what we human developers would see as clean, beautiful code...

[lubujackson]

There is a ton of optimization possible when we are able to observe how LLMs and agents process and navigate our code given different prompts. For example, our MCP was pulling down way too much data to resolve a simple "count rows" request. Once you see it, it's easy to resolve but I don't know of a good framework yet for walking through some of these patterns.

I built an eval framework to look just at tool calls given a static prompt, with the idea that LLMs should be able to deduce the best tool calls and arguments needed to get requested data. Not as great as full observability, but helpful for complex tool interactions. Anyone have any good tools for this problem?

In the same way we mentally walk through deterministic logic, SWEs need to learn to anticipate LLM context and tool awareness, which is much trickier to reason through, especially given the various LLM IDEs and how they manage context as a black box.

[mptest]

If you read anthropic paper on "functional" emotions in llm's you'd have a lot of fun. there's so much research that would be so fun to do if we had the compute to spare

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

[ursillycomment]

This is not something you need to worry about because you are naively anthropomorphizing a next-best token guessing algorithm.

Respectfully, the reason you think “AIs suffer” is because of a shortcoming in your understanding of what an LLM actually is.

This scenario is no different than considering if a shovel gets tired after using it all day to dig holes in the ground.

[mapt]

This sounds a lot like the object of the seminal science fiction work "Don't Build The Torment Nexus".

[LeifCarrotson]

"Don't build the Torment Nexus" is apocryphal, but Lena/MMacevedo is a real fictional story:

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I shudder to think that someone's going to try to emulate that.

[binarysolo]

I audibly LOLed mid-standup call, and now my entire team is playing with this and it looks like this is eating up what little productivity we have on Friday.

Thanks Endless Toil!

[AndrewVos]

I’m very glad to hear someone else is laughing at this as much as me <3

[sharts]

Just add some audible vocal groans and moans that trigger whenever an agent is “thinking.”.

[saghm]

I thought that was the human's job to provide. Have I been doing it wrong?

[npodbielski]

Should be showering sounds. Or walking in circles. And of course head scratching. As the las resort it should be fridge opening and 'meh' of resignation.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

I've long been a fan of Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict"

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5z1D3tEHdw )

[vermilingua]

Missed it by 24 days.

[isolay]

Endless Toil is the future. I believe in you, guys.

[idiotsecant]

Too real.

[bguberfain]

This guy seems to be talking seriously.

[insane_dreamer]

I’m hoping this is satire

[Caius-Cosades]

"Yes, the binaric screams of the machine spirit are an irreplecable part of this project. The project depends no it. No, I will not elaborate further."