The Agent/harness has no meaningful distinction. The backing model(s) can only read through a harness. Call it an agent, call it a tool, call it a library. They are all harnesses if they are backed by a model.
Broadly speaking,
- Copilot only reads AGENTS.md
- Codex reads AGENTS and CONTEXT
- Claude reads CLAUDE
This ai-literacy is noise, muddling the definitions and suggesting yet-another-md-file.
I hang out on various entrepreneurial Reddit subreddits, both to get an idea for what people are building, problems they are having, and occasionally post about my own pain; and also to promote my own product. Every now and then I'll lurk in subreddits that are just stuff I'm interested in too.
I've also gone back to X/Twitter quite heavily (but trying to limit usage and avoid posting in anything politics related). It's hard not to get sucked into it.
Then occasionally sites like the Guardian for general news.
I'm sorry but that's a bit ridiculous. I'm still using an M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM and I have quite heavy usage - docker, other heavy native apps, a bunch of VS.Codes and coding agents, things running in the terminal, background processes. It's just a big exaggeration that general regular productivity apps "easily gobble up over 16GB"
(Edit: saying this as someone who just paid for a new 128GB M5 Pro Studio -- but that's for LLM's, not regular work)
I have an identical gen mac mini I bought for testing out the apple silicon for my workloads a year and a half ago, except it's 16GB min spec version - I got ram throttled on that thing constantly as soon as I start using it for development. If it was just productivity I could get away with it - but as soon as I start something like JetBrains Rider on it or VSCode with C# language memory pressure is in the yellow and if I start a next server for frontend the machine just grinds to a halt. Even when I'm using remote workstation my memory usage is hovering above 20gb with active swap on my laptop. Soo many electron productivity apps eating up ram like crazy.
If it was more readily available on retailers such as Amazon I would even recommend 32gb ram air for local workflows - if you're doing development these days you're just going to need it - especially with LLM workflows and parallelizing work. The price difference between 16 and 24 is not even close to not justify picking it for a work machine.
Thing is having more cores/faster cores might make your workflows 1-2x faster but hitting swap is going to be like >10x degradation
I'm actually working on this problem by building OctoLoops (https://octoloops.com) to help find channels to promote the app and get users. It's working so far (the main agent I'm using is communities, which finds threads on Reddit and Indiehackers to post comments on). It's all human-in-the-loop to avoid being spammy and try to be genuinely helpful to people instead while also promoting the tool.
I'd love to hear your ideas on whether it would be useful for you too. Let me know if you give it a try (email's in HN profile), and good luck with your service!
I'm iterating hard on OctoLoops (https://octoloops.com). 30+ signups, and a handful of users are active and replied to my outreach positively. It's encouraging and I dogfood it but still very early days.
The core idea is building is now easy so let's help people with the hard part: getting (paying) users! It's a marketing harness where you "loop" marketing activities like posting to online communities or direct outreach. Human in the loop so attempting to balance the usual tightrope of reasonableness and being spammy.
Feedback very welcome.
(Never saw myself working on martech but, here I am)
Really excited to have come across your work! I've been struggling with how to promote my own website. OctoLoops can generate distribution plans and draft the comments for me — that's a really great design.
But since everything still has to be posted from my own account, that's honestly yet another headache for someone like me with very little karma. I'll get to work on building up my karma. Hope the site keeps getting better and better!
Nope. I occasionally do human review of my own code and very occasionally of other peoples', but for the most part it's all 100% automated. I use Codex's Github code review integration and it does a pretty decent job of spotting P1's and P2's.
I have subscriptions for ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro, so about $40/month. I use them for coding mostly, switching between them frequently and heavily. On the occasional times I run out of tokens I'll go outside and take a walk or spend time with family.
Been doing it this way for ~the last 6 months or so.
I do also use the API's for GPT and Gemini for some side projects, but the spend there is highly variable. It rarely exceeds $100 in a given month.
"I have so many half-baked ideas for tools or services I barely need, sparked by a combo of unaddressed workaholism and techno-optimist wishful thinking."
This part resonates. AI has been such an accelerator that just yesterday I told Claude to make a brand new "Christian male meal planner with grace quotes from the Bible", bought a domain name, had the whole thing ready to go then thought "wtf am I doing, I already have half a dozen other side projects in the go, this is insane!" and just stopped it.
Human focus is a precious, finite resource. The productivity boom enabled by AI tools is probably going to benefit those capable of laser-like focus the most. Scattered thinkers (like myself, or perhaps the original article author) are in for a struggle at times.
Beliefs need to be justified by evidence that supports a defensible theory. Otherwise, there’s no meaningful basis for choosing between beliefs.
I’m not mocking you. I’m pointing out that you’re making an epistemic mistake, and speculating that at some level, you recognize that, based on your self-described choices.
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