Olscore

Engineering the system means stepping outside of the system.

Not standing on the factory floor reviewing PR widgets.

HN ignored it at 50 stars, 100, 200, 300, 400, about to hit 500. Three or four weeks in, Pullboard is a personal software factory, and people here still think it is about "agent orchestration." It is way past that. Vibe coding is dead.

https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

Automating fun was not on the top of my priorities but sure.

Everybody is converging on similar ideas, but the execution isn't super clean in a lot of "software factories" popping up. Coordinating through shared written state becomes obvious once you build something complex enough. Anyways, I have been building Pullboard (open source). The original concept came from needing agent coherency on a very complicated project.

https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

Building a house has three layers:

1. Vision: what we want (our intent)

2. Blueprint: the spec we wrote (our design)

3. Inspection: checking what we built against the blueprint (the proofs)

This research makes the inspection close to perfect. But an inspection only checks the blueprint, not our vision, so a house built from the wrong blueprint can still pass a perfect inspection. The other half is making sure the blueprint matches our intent and stays that way while agents build. I'm working on that, so I think this is complementary:

https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

The author is wrong, and a software factory isn't a distraction.

People are thinking about this from a quantity angle, but the key is quality, and achieving a self-maintaining project at home. I built a distributed trading system that runs multiple strategies in US options and MUST be correct. So my goal wasn't to build huge quantities of software and pump out garbage, but to ensure correct behavior and proper fixes in the codebase with agents.

Open sourced my methodology: https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

Yes > real issues are in this layer of intent

This is why code is going to be automated, and the software engineer is a link between organizational intent and the code. This is what I’m working on.

Do they matter? Yes. Should you use them? No. (Mostly)

This is going to be opinionated from an extreme "vibe code" viewpoint, but I think the future is "GAD" Governed Agentic Development. Designing constraints that agents must follow, and therefore different forms of frameworks. What the agents need is lines in a coloring book, the human is responsible for drawing those lines. So frameworks of the future should be focused on constraining an agent to develop properly, or designing what is and is not permitted.

Building Autonomously, Open Source: https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

My open source approach: https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

Most days I am capable of running about 15-30 agents across 5 projects, and if I had the budget it would likely scale to 100-1k agents no problem. This is really more of a methodology, and looking at Pullboard on the surface will not reveal why it works. You really have to use it. But it allows my judgement, decision making and preferences to carry down throughout multiple projects. Working on clearer messaging to developers about why this methodology works; I have built very serious systems on Pullboard patterns.

It's not just "orchestration" it's more like a coherence, outcomes and judgement over time.

You are correct that it can all be correct in one sense, and wrong in the product (“what the user wants”) sense. Of course you need to monitor the output, that’s a given. You need to question the entire system. That is the frontier for engineers.

“How is the agent lying to me?” Etc.

I run a quantitative trading system with multiple strategies across a distributed fleet of Mac minis and use Pullboard to be correct. Bugs mean lost money. It works bro. Try it.

About 25-30% of the things shipped by agents need fixes.

It's cute, but my goal is building serious projects autonomously.

https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

Been using the Pullboard workflow to build software that MUST be correct, and recently open sourced it. There was another HN link today involving agents role-playing and I can't take that seriously, no offense. (Love fun projects like this, seriously, it's cool.)

From my perspective, agents are great, they code better than most of us. But like all of us, they also make many mistakes or can't see how their changes impact the codebase. But that is a test-driven development mitigation along with some sort of scrutinizing process, "prove it". I'm actively working on this, and by actively working on it, I mean building serious apps that hit correctness walls, figuring out why Pullboard didn't catch it. To me, this is all about the process.

Haha. Locally it was passing. That badge is GitHub running the tests on its own machines, where a couple of new browser tests fail. Fix is going through the same loop: one agent fixes, another verifies, then it merges.

Interesting seeing other people's approaches to orchestration.

I've been working on Pullboard and just open sourced it: https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard

To me, orchestration is not really the core problem. The bigger challenge is handling agent coherency over long periods of time, (drift) so my solution is a living forum-like system where agents shout to one another, document work in items, and follow doctrine handed down by the developer and work against a known specification that's checkable. I have used this workflow in several large projects that MUST be correct, and it works for me. Currently cleaning it up for other users.

What else would you call students voting for loan forgiveness? Point blank the candidate is effectively saying, "we will give you $xx,xxx" in the form of loan forgiveness. It is the same for healthcare. This is a literal voting for benefits; and, this creates perverse incentives for the electorate to vote for whomever will "pay them" the most for their vote. Candidates are simply buying votes by offering free stuff with taxpayer monies. It is completely broken at this point with one candidate trying to out-give the next.

Fundamentally, it is disgusting we are forced by government to buy insurance products (e.g., car, health) provided by for-profit companies; however, I do not support universal healthcare either. The government has zero ability to control its expenditure, because the electorate vote themselves benefits.

The long-term financial incentives to maintain a functioning society are all broken because of the misaligned short-term (vote for me, get free stuff) and long-term incentives (debt reduction, financial management, business planning and other investments.) Voters are simply looting the treasury at this point. It is a shame. I cannot believe anyone actually buys into the notion that government will fix problems, or somehow do a better job than what already exists.

The candidates are just handing you money from your own pockets, and skimming off the top.

It's so damn dumb.

Neat product, we rolled something similar to this using Slack where we manage the phone system, etc. I especially like how you can reply within Slack and text back the customer. Seems like your major problem with this startup is usage costs as text messages and phone calls can quickly add up. We are a small team of ~7 people and our monthly Twilio expense is twice your price here. I.e., not priced high enough.

I might prefer this product with a slight change: instead of trusting you my business phone number, maybe I could simply point my Twilio endpoint to your servers? That way you are not soaking up passthrough costs of customer usage; plus, I don't have to worry about getting my number from you after all my customers are familiar with that number. Anyways, it's a neat concept. I have provided our phone system to other businesses and can totally see the value in this product.

There's no need to fit the post into a larger narrative; it is what it is. Seems more like you may be projecting your psychology or fears onto the article. It's just a list of pricing psychology tricks. And it cuts both ways you know; readers learn how pricing strategies may affect their buying decisions.

The article is not advocating for the "manipulation" of anyone. It's up to the reader to implement, ignore or consider. If the title and some words were rephrased it could be an article on how to spot pricing tricks; the content would mostly be the same.

It's you.

Your last question is loaded; it assumes maximizing profit is bad. In practice high profit margins are often a reward for being first to market. Maybe those high margins are a recompense for R&D costs. Plenty of answers to rebuke your suggestion that maximizing profits is unethical. It's also a situational topic made more nuanced by the specific product, company and many other circumstances.

> get less than zero sympathy if they talk about having difficult lives

You just proved this part.

Except the Regressive Left is doing a good job proving they aren't all that open minded. The new liberal coming out of college campuses from safe spaces is not open minded at all. So perhaps in the past Liberals could make the claim of open mindedness, but not today. Especially when conservatives are banned from speaking on college campuses, not to mention being banned from social media.

Yep. I received a similar score (73% liberal) and consider myself in-between Libertarian and Conservative. The test is totally bogus.

Then we can argue about the definition of safe, or the reasonable expectation of safety. But it seems that Hacker News would rather point to one example which apparently "invalidates" the claim "handily". What do you consider safe then? If you are determined to argue based on one example; Do you not take a risk starting a business? Do you not take a risk eating foods? Do you not take a risk driving?

There are reasonable mistakes made in the course of living and of any action. So if you want to exaggerate the claim of one (or even a few) examples to the point of making it appear as an epidemic in America; then I will hold you to a higher standard than the half-assed arguments that I see here. Many people engaged with these narratives are grossly misrepresenting legitimate claims of police brutality or racial discrimination. If you cannot be honest in debate, then I would also not expect the same to be honest in any proposed solution. Blatant misrepresentation by so many; it's disgusting.