Show HN: Margarita - Programming language for Agents using Markdown-ish syntax | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Margarita - Programming language for Agents using Markdown-ish syntax

margarita.run

7 pointsmargarita_dev4 comments

On my list of build it from scratch has always been to build a programming language. So with the help of AI I was able to get it done! Why did I build it? At work I've seen two major problems with our ai workflows/ skills libraries. There is a lack of determinism when your whole workflow is a markdown file of 100 steps, and markdown skill libraries lack composability. Meaning we violate things like DRY in the all the md files in the skills library.

I built Margarita to allow for markdown and logical operators to exist together, which means you can bring in determinism through code structures when it makes sense, and fall back to llm dynamic code when that makes sense. As an added bonus allows for composable prompts ala React which solve my other gripe with skills libraries being a mash of text everywhere.

Overall I've been getting pretty luke warm responses from Reddit, so I'll probably just shelve it, but it was a blast to make. Got to build code agents for pretty much every llm provider and built my own harness. I would recommend doing that it's a great learning experience.

https://www.margarita.run https://github.com/Banyango/margarita

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Fairly interesting! A few questions:

- When asking the user for an input, does it support multi turn user conversation?

- Who is this made for? Developers would much rather just use python directly with coding agents; non developers would probably still be afraid of seeing the python-ish syntax in the md file + they wont be able to use existing coding agents cause there would be no examples of this new language in any of the LLM's training data.

But it's an awesome attempt! I like the idea overall, and the design of the website!

- When asking the user for an input, does it support multi turn user conversation? Yes, it supports both multi-turn conversations from the llm and you can programmatically ask the user things too -> https://www.banyango.com/margarita/latest/user_input/

- Who is this made for? I think this is crux of my issues so far here. I have been targeting developers who maybe don't see as much value in this as you mentioned.

That said I think that there is a decent cost to developers for maintaining code each time you want more determinism, or don't want to spend tokens on repeatable steps. My hope was that having a lower cost solution closer to markdown would be a nice middle ground.

I am puzzled by the example on the homepage - does it show the agent failing to follow the instructions properly?

> Review this code snippet and set `score` to a number from 0–10

> ↳ set score = 72

...or is it the comments further down influencing the behaviour:

    // This runs the agent
    // score is set to 72
    // feedback is set to Simple and correct...
    @effect run

if so is that supposed to happen?

it's all a bit confusing

Whoops, good catch! Not sure how I didn't see that. This was not input I copied from the tool, rather I got claude to create an HTML representation of the terminal output from a screenshot. Fixing that up now.

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