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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

  > This tutorial is focusing on the low-level internals of how agents are implemented

We have very different definitions of what "low-level" means. Exact opposites in fact. "Low-level" means in the inner workings. Like a low-level language is assembly (some consider C low-level but this is debatable), whereas Python would be high-level.

I don't think this tutorial is "near the metal" of LLMs nor do I think it should be considering it is aimed at "Dummies". Low-level would really need to get into the inner workings of the processing, probing agents, and getting into the weeds.

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> We have very different definitions of what "low-level" means.

Does it really matter if you can understand them? waiting for strongly-opinionated engineers to finish their pedantic spiels (...even when they're wrong or there is no obvious standard of correctness) when everyone already understands each other is one of the most miserable part of being in this industry.

I—and I emphatically don't include the above poster in this view as it takes continual & repeated behavior to accrue such judgement—see this as a small tantrum, essentially, for people who never learned to regulate their emotions in professional spaces. I don't understand why this sort of bickering is considered acceptable behavior in the workplace or adjacent spaces. It's rude, arrogant, trivially avoidable with slight change in tone and rhetoric, and it makes you look like an asshole if you're not 100% right and approach it in good humor.

Yes even if I can understand them it matters. We should correct ourselves and enable better communication moving forward. I would also say that it too is rude, arrogant, and makes you look like an asshole if you are using words incorrectly and then defending that usage. One must conclude that either you have too much ego to correct yourself or you are intentionally misleading people.

Why do you see this among engineers frequently? Well because it's the job of an expert to be concerned with nuance and details. The low-level in fact. This requires a high precision in communication too. The back and forth you see as bickering also ends up getting those details communicated. The reason being is that much of what's being intended is implicit. So the other approach is to use a lot of words. Unfortunately when you do that you are often ignored.

I think "low-level" is relative to what's being discussed. Low-level for LLMs would have to do with how transformer layers are implemented (self-attention layer, layer norms, etc.) whereas low-level for agents would be the graph structure.

Although I personally don't think the graph implementation for agents is necessarily as established or widely standardized, it's helpful to know about why such an implementation was chosen and how it works.

> the inner workings of the processing, probing agents, and getting into the weeds

These feel to me like empty words... "inner workings of the processing"? You can say that about anything.

I'm not quite sure I agree, but I do get your point. Why I don't quite agree is that the agents are communicating and thus the "in the weeds" part is getting into how that communication is being processed. Which is what makes or breaks agents. How they interpret one another and respond. There needs to be some mech interp for me to really think of something as low-level. I'll put emphasis on the in the weeds part. Nuance and details are critical parts to a low-level conversation.

  > You can say that about anything.

That is true. But it is also true that you can approach any topic from low-level or high-level. So I'm not sure I get your point here.

What I meant was, the phrase "inner workings of the processing" doesn't really mean anything at all. i.e. it doesn't convey any useful information about what you're trying to say.

> How they interpret one another and respond.

That sounds like it just falls back to "how LLMs work". It's the wrong level of abstraction in this case, because it's one level down from the topic being discussed here.

Certainly it means something. Alone it says little but in both previous comments there are other words to provide context and even explicitly communicate that I mean you need to be looking at the tokens and token passing. How the LLMs communicate. The low-level details in how that communication operates.

  > because it's one level down

So we're in agreement?

Aren't we after the "low-level"? That's this whole conversation... yes, it is a level down, that's my whole point. Just as my original analogy with assembly being a level down from C. Working at the metal, as they say. In the weeds.

I honestly don't know how to respond because I'm saying "this is too high-level" and you're arguing "you're too low-level". I'm sorry, but when you do stuff at the low-level you in fact have to crouch down and put your face to the ground. The lower the better. You're trying to see something very small, we're not trying to observe mountains here

By low-level, it is with respect to the agent interface.

The original purpose is to help people understand how the inner agent framework is internally implemented, like those:

OpenAI Agents: https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python/blob/48ff99bb... Pydantic Agents: https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/blob/4c0f384a0626299... Langchain: https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain/blob/4d1d726e61ed5... LangGraph: https://github.com/langchain-ai/langgraph/blob/24f7d7c4399e2...

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