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Comment by isityettime | Hacker News Reader

Afaict all harnesses are wrong in this respect, some of them deeply so.

Slash commands, for instance, are a misfeature. I should never have to wait for the chatbot finish a turn so that I can check on the status of my context window or how much money I've spent this session. Control should be orthogonal to the chat loop.

Even things that have nothing to do with controlling the text generator's input and output are entangled with chat actions for no good reason except "it's a chat thing, let's pretend we're operating an IRC bot".

There are a zillion LLM agents out there nowadays, but none of them really separate control from the agent loop from presentation well. (A few do at least have headless modes, which is cool.)

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> Slash commands, for instance, are a misfeature. I should never have to wait for the chatbot finish a turn so that I can check on the status of my context window or how much money I've spent this session. Control should be orthogonal to the chat loop.

I get what you're trying to say but in practice architecting what you propose is considerably more difficult. Why not build it and try to get hired by one of the bigcos?

I don't think the basic architecture principles are novel. The big AI labs and other large tech companies already have engineers who can see this, without a doubt. But the AI labs clearly don't care if their LLM agents are just big balls of mud, and the big tech companies priorities mostly lie elsewhere, too.

They just want features. They don't really care about duplicated work, so half of them reinvent the TUI rendering wheel. Pluggability is something that might be actually hostile to their interests in lock-in. And the AI labs probably think "after a couple more scaling cycles, our models will be so good that our agents can just rewrite themselves from scratch"; until they hit a compute or power wall, it always looks rational to them to defer rearchitecting.

Another real possibility is that if you work on an agent with a really clean architecture and publish it in hopes of getting hired by some AI company, all of them think "that looks great, but we don't want to rearchitect right now". Your code winds up in the training set, and a year and a half from now, existing agents can "one-shot" rewrites along the lines of your design because they're "smarter".

As for me, I'm not that interested, personally. There are other things I want to build and I'm working on those.

In what way would it be more complicated? This is pretty basic concurrent programming, we routinely have much much more complex concurrent designs..

Hell, a telegram bot can handle that just fine.

Yeah, basic concurrent programming is not more complicated than basic linear programming

I use the Codex desktop app.

In the GUI I can see the context indicator and usage stats.

It also makes it easier to jump between conversations and see the updates.

Sometimes I use Claude Code or opencode in the terminal, and my experience is much poorer compared to the Codex desktop app.

In codex CLI /status works just fine during a turn.

Other things don't though.

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