Hacker News Reader

Comment by bglusman | Hacker News Reader

Funny timing. I’ve been building something adjacent, though from a different angle: not primarily local-model reliability, but a control layer around agent execution, tools, routing, and operator intent. I was calling these "synthetic models", but decided yesterday "LLM middleware" is a clearer description.

Very early prototype, so I’m looking more for architectural/conceptual reactions than polish: https://wardwright.dev / https://github.com/bglusman/wardwright

The common thread I see is treating the harness around the model as first-class infrastructure. Forge seems focused on tool-call correctness and recovery; Wardwright is more about controlling what the agent is supposed to do, where work gets routed, and how the operator stays in the loop.

Curious whether you see those as complementary layers. I’m planning to try Forge and would be interested in seeing whether they fit together cleanly.

View on HN

Conceptually I think definitely! Forge has no opinion on what the agent should be trying to do, that's the "middleware"'s job, so to speak.

Forge is just trying to make sure that when the model decides to do something, thee execution is reliable.

As for software integration, let me know if you run into any issues and I'll be happy to take a look or try to patch something!

Harnesses as first class infra all the way. I'll take a look at your work and see if I spot any obvious tensions.

I've just read through your readme and I have zero clue what this does. Something about proxying model calls and applying "policies" to them? But what kind of things does it actually do, what benefits are there? That should be at the top of the readme.

I'm sorry to hear that! I'll take a fresh look at docs in my upcoming release.

In a nutshell, it applies guardrails around LLM calls to make them more reliable - specifically small models but works on all: "on multi-step agentic workflows through guardrails (rescue parsing, retry nudges, step enforcement) and context management (VRAM-aware budgets, tiered compaction).".

It'll try to parse malformed tool calls, it'll automatically compact if needed, it'll enforce any workflow requirements you define (ie, read before edit) - and it does so with domain-agnostic guardrails. It catches and feeds errors back to the model in a structured way so the model self-corrects (hopefully).

Each guardrail can be removed as desired by a consumer. It can be used as a building block library (WorkflowRunner approach), it can be integrated into existing source (middleware), or it can be a drop-in addition to an exiting workflow (proxy mode).

I think that comment was aimed at my Wardwright link, not Forge, given mention of policies and proxying model calls! I think your docs are in much better shape ;-)

lol - my bad! but thanks!

Yes it was for wardright, sorry for the confusion. Your forge explanation is clear.

Ironically, the project this idea emerged out of for me is also called Forge, actually Calciforge… https://calciforge.org / https://github.com/bglusman/calciforge

Name was just a portmanteau of Calcifer's forge, because Howl’s moving castle seemed like a good metaphor for what I was trying to do… I had synthetic models as apiece there but I realized a) it was out of place and b) it was my favorite feature there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com