Re:Show HN: I built an AI agent that turns ROS 2's turtlesim...
by ponta17 on Saturday May 31, 2025 @11:45AM
(#44145009)
Thanks for the thoughtful question! The term “agent” definitely gets used in a lot of different ways, so I’ll clarify what I mean here.
In this project, an agent is an LLM-powered system that takes a high-level user instruction, reasons about what steps are needed to fulfill it, and then executes those steps using a set of tools. So it’s more than a single prompted LLM call — the agent maintains a kind of working state and can call external functions iteratively as it plans and acts.
Concretely, in turtlesim_agent, the agent receives an input like “draw a red triangle,” and then:
1. Uses the LLM to interpret the intent,
2. Decides which tools to use (like move forward, turn, set pen color),
3. Calls those tools step-by-step until the task is done.
In this project, an agent is an LLM-powered system that takes a high-level user instruction, reasons about what steps are needed to fulfill it, and then executes those steps using a set of tools. So it’s more than a single prompted LLM call — the agent maintains a kind of working state and can call external functions iteratively as it plans and acts.
Concretely, in turtlesim_agent, the agent receives an input like “draw a red triangle,” and then: 1. Uses the LLM to interpret the intent, 2. Decides which tools to use (like move forward, turn, set pen color), 3. Calls those tools step-by-step until the task is done.
Hope that clears it up a bit!