I'm writing my own agent too as a side project at work. This is a good article but simultaneously kinda disappointing. The entire agent space has disappeared down the same hole, with exactly the same core design used everywhere and everyone making the same mistakes. The focus on TUIs I find especially odd. We're at the dawn of the AI age and people are trying to optimize the framerate of Teletext? If you care about framerates use a proper GUI framework!
The agent I'm writing shares some ideas with Pi but otherwise departs quite drastically from the core design used by Claude Code, Codex, Pi etc, and it seems to have yielded some nice benefits:
• No early stopping ("shall I continue?", "5 tests failed -> all tests passed, I'm done" etc).
• No permission prompts but also no YOLO mode or broken Seatbelt sandboxes. Everything is executed in a customized container designed specifically for the model and adapted to its needs. The agent does a lot of container management to make this work well.
• Agent can manage its own context window, and does. I never needed to add compaction because I never yet saw it run out of context.
• Seems to be fast compared to other agents, at least in any environment where there's heavy load on the inferencing servers.
• Eliminates "slop-isms" like excessive error swallowing, narrative commenting, dropping fully qualified class names into the middle of source files etc.
• No fancy TUI. I don't want to spend any time fixing flickering bugs when I could be improving its skill at the core tasks I actually need it for.
It's got downsides too, it's very overfit to the exact things I've needed and the corporate environment it runs in. It's not a full replacement for CC or Codex. But I use it all the time and it writes nearly all my code now.
The agent is owned by the company and they're starting to ask about whether it could be productized so I suppose I can't really go into the techniques used to achieve this, sorry. Suffice it to say that the agent design space is far wider and deeper than you'd initially intuit from reading articles like this. None of the ideas in my agent are hard to come up with so explore!
The agent I'm writing shares some ideas with Pi but otherwise departs quite drastically from the core design used by Claude Code, Codex, Pi etc, and it seems to have yielded some nice benefits:
• No early stopping ("shall I continue?", "5 tests failed -> all tests passed, I'm done" etc).
• No permission prompts but also no YOLO mode or broken Seatbelt sandboxes. Everything is executed in a customized container designed specifically for the model and adapted to its needs. The agent does a lot of container management to make this work well.
• Agent can manage its own context window, and does. I never needed to add compaction because I never yet saw it run out of context.
• Seems to be fast compared to other agents, at least in any environment where there's heavy load on the inferencing servers.
• Eliminates "slop-isms" like excessive error swallowing, narrative commenting, dropping fully qualified class names into the middle of source files etc.
• No fancy TUI. I don't want to spend any time fixing flickering bugs when I could be improving its skill at the core tasks I actually need it for.
It's got downsides too, it's very overfit to the exact things I've needed and the corporate environment it runs in. It's not a full replacement for CC or Codex. But I use it all the time and it writes nearly all my code now.
The agent is owned by the company and they're starting to ask about whether it could be productized so I suppose I can't really go into the techniques used to achieve this, sorry. Suffice it to say that the agent design space is far wider and deeper than you'd initially intuit from reading articles like this. None of the ideas in my agent are hard to come up with so explore!