Comment by asim
4 days ago
The agentic loop. The brain in the machine. Effectively a replacement for the rules engine. Still with a lot of quirks but crawshaw and many others from the Google era have a great way of distilling it down to its essence. It provides clarity for me as I see it over and over. Connect the agent tools, prompt it via some user request and let it go, and then repeat this process, maybe the prompt evolves over time to be a response from elsewhere, who knows. But essentially putting aside attempts to mimic human interaction and problem solving, it's going to be a useful tool for replacing orchestration or multi-step tasks that are somewhat ambiguous. That ambiguity is what we had to code before, and maybe now it'll be gone. In a production environment maybe there's a bit of a worry of executing things without a dry run but our tools, services, etc will evolve.
I am personally really interested to see what happens when you connect this in an environment of 100+ services that all look the same, behave the same and provide a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc. When you can give it all the generic abstractions for everything we use, it can become a better assistant than what we have now or possibly even more than that.
> When you can give it all the generic abstractions for everything we use, it can become a better assistant than what we have now or possibly even more than that.
The range of possibilities also comes with a terrifying range of things that could go wrong...
Reliability engineering, quality assurance, permissions management, security, and privacy concerns are going to be very important in the near future.
People criticize Apple for being slow to release a better voice assistant than Siri that can do more, but I wonder how much of their trepidation comes from these concerns. Maybe they're waiting for someone else to jump on the grenade first.
> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc.
Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...