Ask HN: Are you building agents? What do they need access to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you building agents? What do they need access to?

3 pointsasim4 comments

I'm curious to know who our building agents and what are they building them for and what kind of external access do you need to different kinds of data or apis?

I previously built an API platform that tried to aggregate a lot of the main needs for app development or web development. The idea you know to build some MVP you need authentication and a database and maybe email, SMS that kind of stuff. And I'm starting to see the same kind of thing with agents. Where past certain prototyping you do start to need access to external information or data. A lot of it. You can just develop straight on the machine but otherwise you know you got to go get API keys and do integration and whatever else. So I'm just curious to know what people are doing or using.

I'm building the agentic runtime and agents running on this platform. The keystone of agentic work is "allowlists vs denylists" choice. On my platform I use allowlists for everything (tools, MCPs, skills, memories etc.). Agents work in a sandbox and have only allowed resources they need for functioning. Nothing more. The LLM is a probabilistic by nature, it can try to access or delete the resource without a reason, it may follow the prompt injection, it may leak the secret or private data. So all this should be controlled by the agentic runtime. In my system I use specialized agents as team players - each agent does it's part of work using available resources. This way you can keep all needed data in the model's context window without compaction and optimize resources control. Ask more specific question if you need a detailed answer.

I don't want to be mean, but you sound confused.

Are you building agents? or building apps? Or building an API platform that has everything from databases and auth and coffee making capabilities?

Sorry for meandering, but this is a common issue, way more people build builders and sell shovels than there is a demand for, and it's usually a way to escape actually building an application.

Try building something concrete, and asking concrete questions about that.

I'm not confused. I was highlighting my past experiences and was curious to know what APIs/MCP servers or external resource people are using for Agents. That's it.

I want to build an SEO agent with access to SERP and keyword volume data

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