brainless

Hey HN folks, I am building a new agent (desktop app) which uses text splitting as the core mechanism to manage context - both for humans and agents.

To allow users to have infinite chat without worrying about agent context, even sharing the chat with other users - say you want to mention legal team or dev team for a specific issue in your chat with agent.

Can use any agent/LLM internally. Would love to get your thoughts.

I doubt this. SaaS was created by enterprises who wanted to ship features into a pipeline they control end to end. The user gets to use it through a UI. Slowly SaaS became good enough and people stopped investing into their own custom workflow.

If building own workflow was cheap, I doubt SaaS would even take off. Businesses used to build on top of Drupal, Django, Rails, Magento and everything else like that. But those frameworks also become complex as they try to fit everyone's need.

LLMs cut that. You build what you want, perhaps on top of a lean framework. This "someone else taking responsibility" is how SaaS marketing won, but in this era, maintaining a small software should not be an issue. SaaS is complex because it has to serve needs of many. It has different requirements. A custom automation does not.

I am working toward similar goals but with a different approach. With LLMs, software can become more personal, customized, quirky even. Software will fit the last mile better than ever.

The solution is not another SaaS. But desktop apps. Less dependence on a cloud. Of course we need backups. And we need networking. Perhaps peer to peer. Or run a tiny VPS.

Businesses, families, communities building their own workflows. The agent is at the core. And an agent that can work with any LLM. Build agents for non-technical people. Stick to a tech stack, offer end to end (from prompt to deploying generated code on VPS) out of the box from the harness.

I think you are missing the point. A person who has built trust through their work will surely attract praise, respect or at least curious gaze. I am sure most things you own, follow or give importance to also have some known person or brand behind them.

Consistency is key. Just showing your foot at the door regularly matters. People remember the name - it becomes the brand.

I would agree 100% with you if context was not an issue. But it is and a big one. In a chat, I have questions and investigations that should always branch off. I also make tiny test implementations from an ongoing idea (in the chat). Forking the idea, or even running parallel ideas. None of these are possible unless we can manipulate the text, split into smaller chunks and send off to agents.

Thanks Julian, I just checked it and it looks lovely and ticks quite a few of the boxes in my mental model. I will clone and dig in.

Also, I don't remember how but I have heard of JUCE before and I immediately recognized it even though I have never used it. I think I spend too much time on github :D

Nice to see a gui coding agent. I use tui agents all the time but I am building a gui one. I use Claude Code, Codex, opencode and a couple other but I do not like the DX/UX.

I often want click a part of the wall of text (from agent) and search for related text, open them up on the side or so. I want to open a linked file. I want to answer multiple questions in an async manner, even come back and continue answering the next day.

There are many prompt level features I want too - orchestrate with subagents, but only the tasks I select - how do I select when there is no checkbox. Or maybe delegate a subagent to dig into (read only) one portion of the chat response. Maybe codify (write) only one task in a list of tasks. So many many other small things.

As a full-time user of coding agents, the TUI barely works for me. I think splitting text, searching in text, merging text are more important in agent driven development than ever before. It is all text, all the way. This is what I am building myself, with my own gui framework.

I wish them all the success. This may threaten many governments. Youth and citizens around the world will watch how this government will perform. Hope.

I feel governments are made of people who barely know anything. It is getting worse. From the US to European nations, India to Australia. Make deals with powerful people, get a seat, serve the powerful. That is modern democracy.

A year ago, it was not sure if the core companies around programming would move to more agent enabled workflow. Companies like JetBrains.

I love their products. But it's clear now that programming is now spec management and how do we control agents. I don't need JetBrains for that.

And spec management will become less technical as models get better. What does JetBrains think is the long term goal for this product? I don't think it'll make any sense in a few months.

Forgive the skepticism: Is this a harness that sits beside a language runtime, looks at traces/logs and uses an LLM to optimize code for given hardware?

It looks interesting but I am really unable to see what is so different from a couple days of prompts and digging into a software to optimize it using LLMs.

I do not think OAI/Anthropic make the biggest share of their revenue from subscription. The largest share is from API spends. That is what DeepSeek or others aim for as well.

This is lovely. Tried on speaker, will try with headphones.

I have a chicken farm (and a pig farm but I manage the chickens myself). I want to start a duck farm with a fish pond. Living in a small village and enjoying these things in real life actually changed my life in ways that I cannot explain.

I still (get agents to) write software but my daily life is around the farm and village life (mostly a Sun centric routine). I have to share a bunch of photos, not doing that enough. And I want to record all the bird sounds. Perhaps host a livestream. I live here; the home stay is by the host family: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TEUSdwvko2DRWmou5

Very similar boat. In my twenties I used to look down on working with hands - like carpenter, farmer, plumber. Now, I want to only do this. I switch between farm and desk work all day.

I started bake a couple years back but I am just not consistent. Need to get to that, would love to have fresh bread in the morning since we don't have that in any village nearby.

I am 43 and only in the last few years have things turned better. I want to say that life is tough for different people from different parts of the world. For various reasons. But overall we have a set of systems that do not care.

The lack of friendship, care, love cannot be eased with money. I used to be crazy about startups. I used to want to live in New York (I am from Kolkata). I had a great run in my twenties but I crashed many years ago. Living in Germany helped a lot. I realized I was not loved or cared for. By myself mostly.

My parents love me but my dad has mental health issues which took a really bad toll on my childhood and teen years. I swept away the need for a love and care and replaced it with money. Many of us are doing this. The system needs most of us to slave. Now, I have been living the village life for about 6 years. I moved my parents as well. We have farms. I still write software, well, mostly generate them with LLMs.

There is a sense of purpose here that I started to feel. Over these last years, I have become more calm than I ever was. Happier, in a way I notice, every day. With less money than I ever had. Life is not about lots of achievements. We need meaning, love, purpose, care, friendships. We need slows walks, flowing water, walk in the rain, healthy food with zero labels. We need to grow our crops, care for animals, raise kids as a village.

I know I am typing this on a computer. But I no longer work for any tech company. I have a small consultancy client. I live as per a typical countryside routine. Most of my (whatever little savings) money is now invested in our farms where I work a few hours everyday, on time. Animals, dirt, mud, poop, crops, cleaning. All of it. Connected to how life is supposed to be. I used to hate glass buildings, still do.

Concrete, glass and everything about artificial spaces makes me sick. I am just one person, I do not have some research paper. But I know how I feel today vs a decade ago. Hope it helps.

I remember CGI days and I have written tiny web "features" with Perl and C many years ago. All my product backends are now in Rust and SQLite but I use frameworks and libraries. Like Tokio, Auxum/Actix Web, Diesel.

I am not sure I like the idea that the binary will be called by nginx on each request. I prefer the backend binary to have state. A 256 MiB virtual instance is enough for any software shared between friends, family or even a small community.

SQLite backups are easy. I really like how I am building web apps these days. Been with PHP for 7 years and then Python for 10+ years. Single binaries are awesome. I am looking at multi-server backends as well, still 256 - 512 MiB per instance but with a shared Redis. Still with SQLite. Should easy enable medium sized business software.

To me, "self-hosted" means, either I use a rented hardware or I use a purchased hardware.

If the software can be switched to a rented or purchased hardware (I do not want Cloudflare's offering) then it is "self-host-able" IMO.

I think there are open source Cloudflare alternative hosting software.

I am not an expert, just an engineer with years of experience. I switched to Rust a couple years ago. I was still learning before LLM generated Rust was good enough that I stopped coding by hand.

Again, not a language expert, but: if you can describe your domain or business logic as clearly as a strongly typed language with a rich type system, most of your issues are gone. Enum and Struct with all the other core types plus the match expressions does most of my mental heavy lifting. I do not even track any of the recent language changes.

What I really care about is the shape of what I am describing - does it translate to code? How much do I lose in the translation? I want to try other languages, particularly Lisp but Rust is at this moment my choice. I have my own UI framework (1), my own provenance based business domain generator and a few simple language parsers.

I am building apps where you can, for example, throw a CSV file (2), ask questions in English and get answers - without using an LLM. Parser. Rust is no doubt a great language to express - not as a programmer, but as a prompter. I do not write the code. I ask LLMs to generate it using only basic knowledge of Rust and its type system. This will be the key to work with LLMs for majority of people.

1. https://github.com/brainless/akar

2. https://github.com/brainless/baho

Thanks again, I have hope.

SQLite/Turso fits my own agent/harness mental model very well but I am, as folks in the valley would say, a bit of an anti-capitalist.

I am working on my own agents that are anti-tokenmaxxers. SQLite/Turso is part of the deployed app architecture from my harness. Thanks a lot for taking the time.

Huh? Supabase is also that. Lots of tech is like this. Parent company makes money from hosting, services, enterprise feature seats, etc.

You mean, it has never happened that an acquiring company said this and then closed the acquired tech?

I am fully onboard with LLM generated code if that is what you mean. I literally get client work titled "Need Claude led Engineer". SQLite is a great option for the LLM enabled future.

Thanks but you do understand this makes it hard for folks to select Turso. With all good intentions parent companies kill acquisitions.

Supabase is hosted Postgres with wings. Turso seemed like it would be the same but using SQLite based approach.

So either Supabase now uses the Turso sync + Postgres or something that needs Turso or abandons it. Not sure and I am not asking, just sharing my thoughts.

Love what you folks have been doing.

I do not feel good about this. I really want SQLite (and the Turso re-write of it) to win for tiny apps that people will build more and more with LLMs. Desktop or server. Even serverless.

The core tech is open source so that is good. Will it stay? I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?

What I mean is that a lot of the popular languages have an engine written in C. Fairly common pattern. I get it that we want to abstract but sometimes it feels we just want to avoid dealing with a language that is one layer below.

Now, LLMs can.

How many of the popular languages are running C underneath? Count them, I will wait.

If a language is Turing complete, why build another language right on top? Most of the interpreted languages are running an engine written in C. Was C not enough? Or was it that we needed abstraction?

It is nice to be in our bubble but if what you said is true, why do we only have like 3 major instruction sets? Why not 40? Programming languages are just easy to create - this is a good thing and we created too many. But it absolutely fractured the industry.

Look at the average job post. There are requirements for system design - good. Algorightms - good. Then it goes into this whole language/framework land. Remembering syntax is literally there in many companies interview. These are preferences. If we understand how a computer executes binary/assembly, the layers above are not as relevant as we have made them.

I have personally wanted to learn and actually use Lisp. I will get to it, even with all the LLM enabled programming. But yes, this is one of those things.

We have reinvented so many ideas many different ways in many different languages and frameworks simply because we want our flavored version.

I have been programming for about 30 years (including school years). Professionally for 18 years.

Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones? Then about 20 frameworks in each of them. And add another 200 popular libraries for each language? This matrix make no sense till you realize - it is preferences all the way down.

Most of us engineers have built our own mental model of programming. We are all right. But the users do not care. LLMs are here to produce code closer and closer to the metal as needed. They can sit and create a graph out of every spec, use an AST that they develop and run on the CPU if they have to. They will do it. No amount of us discussing will stop that.

Programming is going to be re-invented. I do not think the current ways to write software will even matter.