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Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:29PM (#36959300)
We built this as an experiment in self-programming, combining the best of LLMs and code to help automate tasks around you.

I personally use it to track the tides and get notified when certain conditions are met, something that pure LLMs had trouble dealing with and pure code was often too brittle for.

Happy to answer any questions folks have!

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jwomers on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:06PM (#36963823)
Hi! What a great personal project! I was trying to scrape a page and use GPT to analyze it, and then send me an email IF there was a certain type of (fuzzily defined) content on the page. How would I add the conditional check/step on the email block? Thanks!
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:44PM (#36964287)
Great question! Right now the solution is pretty hacky, but if your code block outputs to stderr then we stop the loop execution.

As an example in Javascript, simply calling `throw new Error('break!')` will stop the run from continuing.

We plan to add conditionals, branching, etc. Baby steps :)

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by warthog on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:29PM (#36964113)
Would be good to see the open source code for sure. LLMs really struggle with Plan and Execute agents still and hopping off from tool to tool is a drag. This kind of architecture is less magical but more reliable
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:46PM (#36964313)
Agreed, nobody wants to use a tool that stops working in a month!

Most of the code is actually pretty simple, the complexity comes from the code runners and the infra needed to support the various integrations.

To open source it, we'll need to create some local code-runner alternative, as not everyone wants to spin up AWS resources. With that said, we're excited about running this locally ourselves (e.g. scripting various things on-device).

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by calabin on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:52PM (#36964377)
This is very cool. I like how simple it is, and I think this is a nice first step towards making LLMs long-term useful for the layperson.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @06:58PM (#36964430)
Thanks calabin! We're pretty excited about the potential for LLMs to democratize the ability to program computers (and increasingly the world around us).
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by caesil on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @07:33PM (#36964780)
Damn, this could get incredibly powerful. Nice work!
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @07:46PM (#36964891)
Thanks caesil, we're pretty excited about the potential of Magic Loops.

Right now the code blocks can't access the internet, but the possibilities will be endless when that lands.

Would love any integration requests!

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by notahacker on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @07:56PM (#36964990)
I do like the way your UI strips out some of the ambiguity in how your initial prompt is interpreted by an LLM and allows for editing and parameterisation and IFTTT outputs. Especially since exactly how LLMs parse complex instructions is hard to test. There's definitely a sweet spot between "type instruction and hope for magical understanding" and "write the program yourself"

(though as it still involves LLMs I'd probably want to use it for stuff that sounds less mission critical than some of your examples!)

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:34PM (#36965325)
Completely agree -- LLMs are super powerful, but code is predictable. We found the best loops are ones that are almost entirely code (built with the LLM's help of course!) and only use LLM blocks for very specific and repeatable tasks, if at all.

We see a future where the code can be "self-healing" as well, with user approval of course.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jondwillis on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:06PM (#36965063)
+1, I love how the blocks provide transparency. I have been mulling over the UX for a somewhat similar app that I have been working on, and I may borrow some of how this works.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:35PM (#36965332)
Happy to chat about some of our decisions (or lack thereof!)
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @08:31PM (#36965295)
Pretty cool tool, could turn into something really powerful.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jayzalowitz on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @09:58PM (#36966024)
Are you willing to open source this?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:07PM (#36966514)
We’re definitely thinking about it — running loops using a local runtime could enable some neat use-cases.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by obiefernandez on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:09PM (#36966103)
What are you using to scrape?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by MihaiBulic on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:09PM (#36966529)
We’re using Apify to scrape with their Web Content Scraper actor. It’s nice because they handle proxying for us which decreases the likelihood of us getting blocked. Their “to markdown” functionality is also a lot better than libs you find on npm. They are expensive tho
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by catsarebetter on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:20PM (#36966192)
This is dope. I wonder if you can automate a lot of the web scraping online using this UI
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by thyrox on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:19PM (#36966575)
Isn't GPT 4 very costly? Plus you're running a scraper. How do you plan to keep this free, or is this just a teaser?

This may be useful but would love some clarity on how long you're gonna keep it like this.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:21AM (#36966918)
Great question. Running GPT-4, the scraper, SMS, and email isn't free, so to keep the experiment going forever we would need to charge at some point.

For those finding the service useful already: we're also thinking about open sourcing it so you can just run the loops yourself to keep costs down.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:38PM (#36973267)
What are you using for the scraper?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by kurisufag on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:27PM (#36966618)
heh, I was half-working on something like this. The ideal is to have one stack that can pipe

whisper voice input ("hey, could you tell me what alarms I have tomorrow?") ->

LLM command interpretation ("match input query to pre-defined commands and arguments", "LISTALARMS, , , 8, 2, 2023") ->

underlying script ("{'23:00', 'Doctor's Appointment'}") ->

natural re-statement ("re-word this data as an answer to the question xxx", "you have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 11 o'clock PM") ->

so-vits/tortoise-tts/some TTS plugin

nodes could be fabbed out of single-use .py scripts, and the whole thing could be compiled into a headless script. endless possibilities.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by yz_coding on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @11:30PM (#36966640)
Wow this is so cool, feels like it could be a better Zapier
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by babyshake on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:41AM (#36967033)
* * *
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:38AM (#36967312)
Our goal with Magic Loops was to leverage a LLM-first approach to programming, allowing more people to write code that does useful things.

It turns out that when you write simple programs, they often resemble what you'd find on Zapier or IFTTT :)

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:50PM (#36973436)
Wouldn’t it be possible to leverage Zapier for their integrations instead of trying to imitate that?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:26AM (#37010108)
Definitely! Because it's just code at the end of the day, as soon as our code-runners have internet access you can integrate to your heart's content.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:40PM (#36973292)
Zapier has a pretty big barrier of entry, it already provides countless integrations - that would be the actual tough part to catch up with.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by toomuchtodo on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @08:43PM (#36979888)
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by Tiberium on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:25AM (#36966947)
This looks really cool! I really think an idea of a proper UI tool to chain different tools together is nice. https://flowiseai.com/ seems to be the most similar, but it's quite a bit more technical, and doesn't seem to be focused on doing the whole thing by itself - rather, you can create chains that can then be used through APIs.

I really hope you open-source this :)

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by Tiberium on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:45AM (#36967053)
Found one problem - when I get a really big json (e.g. https://a.4cdn.org/g/catalog.json, sorry for a 4chan example), I can't pass it into the code block because I get "{ "error": "limits.read.size", "message": "Failed while reading stream: Max output size exceeded (100000 bytes)" }"

Is there no way to bypass this currently?

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @01:31AM (#36967275)
I've just increased the limit to 1MB on our test box, which should be sufficient for your file (424KB), but it will take awhile to get the code runners switched over to the new image.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by vermaat on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @05:49AM (#37060499)
Nice work. I'm trying to build something similar, yet different: FlowFlow.AI: Automate your core business workflows by defining step-by-step tasks and follow up actions for the AI agent to execute. - The AI agent decides the appropriate next step in the workflow based on one of the predefined conditions. - Keeps the AI in control within the boundaries of your complex workflows. - Use the FlowFlow API or Python/JS packages to interact with the workflows in your code. FlowFlow.AI is almost ready for the beta launch. :-)
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by parentheses on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:50AM (#36967083)
First of all, this is amazing/fantastic/cool as hell!

Second, this is what I remember Retool looking like long before it became a huge tool. I feel that this is a step towards building bespoke tools using LLM tech. (Of course, I'm sure others started in similar ways, but this is one I remember.)

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by isaacfung on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @02:58AM (#36967861)
I asked it to make a shit post on r/askReddit every minute and it got an error

File "/home/glot/main.py", line 1 var BLOCK_INPUT = `"If you could instantly become an expert in any one subject, what would it be and why?"`; ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @03:15AM (#36967958)
Strange, that line appears to be correct JS. Have you tried regenerating the code?

Each block is editable, even if it doesn't seem so at first (including output!)

It's worth noting that this is not AutoGPT -- the initial generation is just a starting point, and that the actual loop configuration and validation is entirely within your control.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by flarg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:41AM (#36968506)
This is pretty fantastic, well presented and easy to understand. You definitely need to get in front of enterprise customers with this. It hits a lot of key asks from my enterprise customers, simple AI driven insights and automation.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by transformi on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:44AM (#36968828)
Looks Great tool. :)

Suggestion: please add the ability to use credential for social, to be able to perform social tasks.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:10AM (#37010030)
Great suggestion! With internet-accessible code blocks this should be doable soon, but we love the idea of a "first class" block for social APIs.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by yu3zhou4 on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:53AM (#36969212)
This is great. Please consider low cost tier for non-business users, I think many HNers would be willing to pay for such automations
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:23AM (#37010095)
Thanks. The biggest spend is definitely from GPT-4 and the scrapers, so we're exploring a "bring your own" keys approach for those that don't want to run it locally but keep costs down.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by auchenberg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:59AM (#36971001)
Very cool usage of LLMs! Are you planning to build a business around this? Open source?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:22AM (#37010088)
We were working on another product called ChatSeed (ChatGPT for teams) but found that many of our users wanted something with a bit more control. Building Magic Loops has been on our back-burner for awhile, and so we decided to dogfood ChatSeed to build this.

Our current plan is to keep Magic Loops running as long as people seem to like it (and especially because I track the tides with it!), but we also think it could be super powerful to run locally, so we're hoping to open-source it at some point as well.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by Tillgg on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:12AM (#36971163)
Pretty cool concept. ChatGPT meets IFTTT. I could see myself using it for some automations in my life. However, I am not ready to trust you with my API keys just yet. ;)
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:47PM (#36973387)
I suppose a webhook could be set once their instances can access the internet. No trust required.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Thursday August 03, 2023 @05:04PM (#36991873)
You can access the internet using the API blocks, just not from within the code blocks today.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by n00bskoolbus on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:18PM (#36972963)
This all looks very cool! The generic API element is could be really useful as well and it seems like the LLM is pretty good at knowing some pretty common APIs. Would be really cool to run locally but could definitely see it as a business case as well. Way to go!

Will definitely play around with it more

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by royibernthal on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @12:36PM (#36973238)
How do you plan to get around the gpt 4 rate limiting if this thing scales?
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:12AM (#37010039)
Fantastic question. Our goal is to use LLMs to help create the loops, but to rely on code for the majority of (predictable) automation. LLMs make for useful blocks, and oftentimes you can fallback to GPT 3.5 for most structured tasks. With that said, this launch definitely hit some GPT-4 rate limits :)

Also, we hope that an open-source version will allow folks to do more with their own keys.

Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by kentbrew on Thursday August 03, 2023 @03:08AM (#36982373)
Every few years, somebody reinvents Yahoo! Pipes.
Re:Show HN: Magic Loops – Automate anything in 5 minutes by jumploops on Thursday August 03, 2023 @04:55PM (#36991730)
It's Unix all the way down...