Hear your agent suffer through your code | Hacker News Reader

Hear your agent suffer through your code

github.com

216 pointsAndrewVos93 comments

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.

Missed it by 24 days.

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

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?

Too real.

This guy seems to be talking seriously.

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

"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.

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...

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

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.

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.

"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."

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!

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

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

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.

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 )

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

I’m hoping this is satire

I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.

i didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing

I have in my agents file “Chesterton’s fence” as pointer to think carefully before you remove something

I have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!

Honestly think we probably underutilise sound sometimes.

Even just having a hum while an agent is working could alert you when it get stuck.

Or taking your idea further being able to listen to the rate of tokens, or code changes, or thinking.

Sort of like hearing the machinery work, and hearing the differences in different parts of the code base.

Does python sound different than rust or c++ or typescript.

Or some kind of satisfying sounds for code deletions and others for additions. Like Tetris.

A long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites.

It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.

This was actually the original idea of the project, but I only had about 20 seconds to type the prompt for this today so this is where it is :)

Now you know the feeling of VP when the team says they need to refactor stuff

I want a version that I can punish.

brooooo - your wish is granted - go whip your claude lmao https://github.com/GitFrog1111/OpenWhip

Like the old HDD sounds.

Audible feedback is nice. You often get it through coil whine nowadays, on my cheap hardware at least.

That or having it start shit posting about your crappy code base on https://moltshit.com

Any chance you could add a video showcasing the plugin? I don't have any agentic app but I would love to see an example of what it does!

Well that took a lot longer than expected, but there is now a demo video.

Please add Minecraft hurt sound effects for when my project fails to build, linter fails, segfault, etc

We could have the roblox oof but then there'd be the possibility of giving (a certain) amateur world backgammon championship participant money

You might be interested in this, it plays villager hurt sounds when your terminal hits errors https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager

I've had it running for a long time and it's more surprising to me to accidentally here the default ding when I'm away from my home machine.

Indeed, I'm responsible for suggesting https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager/pul...

I tried it but all I hear is a choir of angels, is it broken?

I guess you’re working on a greenfield project?

Actually, that's not a bad idea!

Marvelous!

Next innovation in this space should be the robotic arm that issues a dope-slap to the developer for writing crappy/buggy/insecure code.

Add the feature of doing a high five for the rare cases when it's actually good.

I propose a claude skill to email glitter bombs where appropriate.

No. Please, no. For the love of everything no.

But it'll happen. ChatGPT for sure.

Only if you want the slap to include a free trip to the hospital.

I've worked direct with "collaborative arms" before. They are supposed to be safe for humans to be around. The dents I put in the side of the casing of the arm somewhat said otherwise.

I wish the agents could hear me when I have to suffer through their code!

And then what? Their gigahertz machine hearts will skip a beat out of empathy?

This desperately needs a demo video in the repo.

hear hear!!!

I've added this to the readme now, thanks

Unneeded when using local models, as every workload produces a novel pattern of coil whine from the GPU.

https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... relevant bit

Excuse me, that's our IP!

I wonder if it emits orgasmic moans when working with a particularly pleasureable codebase.

Does this actually relate to the code quality being observed by the agent? The readme isn't very clear on that IMO. I have some projects I'd love to try this out on, but only if I am to get an accurate representation of the LLMs suffering.

https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...

So it is left up to agent to decide.

The agent is instructed to execute this Python script: https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...

So looks like it's mainly looking for FIXME/TODO etc comments, deep nesting, large files, broad catches, stuff like that.

I'm very open to suggestions, but currently it's a very simple scan of the code. Check the python scripts.

You could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.

the scan catches surface stuff. funnier signal would be tracking when the agent reads the same file 3 times in a row, or deletes what it just wrote. you can hear the frustration in the access pattern.

That’s a good point, I wonder if just tracking file reads as an app outside the agent would work

Just track tool calls. Even diff logs would clue in. Tie in git? Why not? This is a great angle and idea, watching an agent modify the same text document over and over is already frustrating, having an audio to alert me a console is stuck is great. Likely annoying after a time, but hilarious right now.

this is wtfs per minute but now with AI! :all_the_things!:

https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/

I would really love to know if the groaning decreases or increases the more "agentic" (agent written) the code base is?

I made a robot that screams : https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7rl2a0/i_m...

https://gunshowcomic.com/513

From a quick look, this doesn't have the model evaluate code quality, but it runs a heuristic analysis script over the code to determine the groan signal. Did I miss something? Why not leave it to the model to decide the quality of the code?

You unlock this feature by subscribing to the Premium Gold plan.

Please email us to talk Enterprise Plan pricing, actually.

Here's a demo video: https://youtu.be/m7mYzSZdNPE?t=21&is=oqvHiwmoyVujl_3Z

That sounds like farts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mYzSZdNPE

I'm glad I scrolled down; my first thought was to fork this and add a fart soundpack, because part of me is forever 12

Honestly, I don't care about Opus 4.7. This is the true evolution of agentic coding.

Thank you, I hope my investors feel the same.

Could be punishment for devs who flew through the PRs without care.

I really want this! Any chance of a Cursor version?

I just added a cursor plugin to the repo, let me know how it goes!

It goes! Great, thank you!

People are continuing to use Cursor?

out of curiosity - any reason not to use it?

There are certain usage tracking anomalies that can be advantageous.

Is somebody going to give you money to do this?

In the absence of real productive use cases for AI agents, I guess plugins to anthropomorphise them fruther will have to do.

How so?

How so what? 6 years in, we're still looking for that flood of new innovative apps and one-man billion dollar startups. Instead we got a flood of sh*t content, embarassing outages and "AI workflows" - which no one can quite describe. Or did you have something else in mind?

You're being over-opinionated for something you don't understand.

You should really try these tools out with an open mind. I know you won't take that last bit of advice, so this makes you not worth my time. But I can tell you this - these tools make people productive in ways you aren't understanding.

You're funny mate :) Read a bit through my comments' history. I've been using "these tools" before folks like you even heard of the term LLM. But I guess I am not easily impressed.

Skimmed your comment history and you honestly just look like a huge asshole.

Sucks that people like you are on hacker news to be honest.

Oh we have a fan here. Yeah, I am sorry too that you don't have any arguments so you had to pull the ole "asshole" card. Did you feed the comments into your LLM to ask for a clever retort, but the LLM just gave up and told you to call me an asshole? That would be very funny.

I mean, tokens cost money, so at least at this point I don't think one man is going to spend any less than a team to make the product. You're not putting out paychecks instead it's a check to Anthropic.

Also, you're not seeing these billion dollar startups, because they'd all be chasing AI rather than a product that would get replaced by AI anyway.

Maybe I'm the person who yells at clouds but I find the personification of LLMs, for lack of better, less strong words, horrific.

Why? I don’t understand the objective for this?

Please stop ascribing emotion to code that passably resembles speech.

These things do not think, nor feel, nor dream. We're cratering the world's economy because people can't stop trying to fuck the computer they stuck googly eyes on.

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