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The agentic development scene has slowly turned into a full-blown JavaScript circus—bright lights, loud chatter, and endless acts that all look suspiciously fam

by mrbonner 10mo ago

The agentic development scene has slowly turned into a full-blown JavaScript circus—bright lights, loud chatter, and endless acts that all look suspiciously familiar. We keep wrapping the same old problems in shiny new packages, parading them around as if they’re groundbreaking innovations. How long before the crowd grows tired of yet another round of “RFC” performances?

rvz 10mo ago
Well, these agentic / AI companies don't even know what an RFC is, let alone how to write one. The last time they attempted to create a "standard" (MCP) it was not only premature, but it was a complete security mess. Apart from Google Inc., I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. [0] "MCP" was one of the worst so-called "standards" ever built since the JWT was proposed. So I do not take Anthropic seriously when they create so-called "open standards" especially when the reference implementation is in Javascript or TypeScript. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards
- lxgr 10mo ago
  To be fair, security wasn’t even a consideration until RFCs were well into triple digits. We’re still very early, as they say. > I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. Why would the IETF have anything to do with LLM/agent standards? This seems like a category error. They also don’t ratify web standards, for example.
  - verdverm 10mo ago
    IETF maintains the HTTP standard https://httpwg.org/ https://httpwg.org/ IETF is involved in protocol standards, MCP/A2A are certainly in this category, skills less so
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 10mo ago
When the AI investment dollars run out. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." (Chuck Prince, Citigroup)
isoprophlex 10mo ago
MCP: we're uber, but for stdout
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  Good job, reading this sentence physically hurts my eyes.
hugs 10mo ago
the tech industry is forever in denial that it is also actually a fashion industry.
- pixl97 10mo ago
  Beyond assembly everything is window dressing.
  - esafak 10mo ago
    The fractal nature of https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ ...
- recursive 10mo ago
  That's only true for companies that make most of their money from investment instead of customers. Those exist too.
  - falcor84 10mo ago
    What do you mean? Are you saying that customers don't follow fashions?
beoberha 10mo ago
It’s a fast moving field. People aren’t coming up with new ideas to be performative. They see issues with the state of the art and make something that may or may not advance things forward. MCP is huge for getting agents to do things in the “real world”. However, it’s costly! Skills is a cheap way to fill that gap for many cases. People are finding immediate value in both of these. Try not to be so pessimistic.
- verdverm 10mo ago
  It's not pessimism, but actual compatibility issues like deno vs npm package ecosystems that didn't work together for many years There are multiple AGENTS vs CLAUDE vs .github/instructions; skills vs commands; ... intermixed and inconsistent concepts, all out in the wild When I work on a project, do all the files align? If I work in an org, where developers have agent choice, how many of these instructions and skills "distros" do I need to put (pollute?) my repo with?
  - ffsm8 10mo ago
    Depending on your workflow, none. While I do agentic development in personal projects a lot at this point, at work it's super rare beyond quick lookups to things I should already know but can't be arsed to remember exactly (like writing a one-off SQL scripts which does batching mutations and similar)
  - detkin 10mo ago
    Skills have been really helpful in my team as we've been encoding tribal knowledge into something that other developers can easily take advantage of. For example, our backend architecture has these hidden patterns, that once encoding in a skill, can be followed by full stack devs doing work there, saving a ton of time in coding and PR review. We then hit the problem of how to best share these and keep them up to date, especially with multiple repositories. It led us to build sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx, a package manager for AI tools.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> full-blown JavaScript circus It is not healthy when you have an obsession this bad, seriously. Seek help.
veunes 10mo ago
There's definitely a performative vibe to a lot of it right now

rvz 10mo ago

Well, these agentic / AI companies don't even know what an RFC is, let alone how to write one. The last time they attempted to create a "standard" (MCP) it was not only premature, but it was a complete security mess. Apart from Google Inc., I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. [0] "MCP" was one of the worst so-called "standards" ever built since the JWT was proposed. So I do not take Anthropic seriously when they create so-called "open standards" especially when the reference implementation is in Javascript or TypeScript. [0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards

lxgr 10mo ago
To be fair, security wasn’t even a consideration until RFCs were well into triple digits. We’re still very early, as they say. > I have not seen a single "AI company" propose an RFC that was reviewed by the IETF and became a proper internet standard. Why would the IETF have anything to do with LLM/agent standards? This seems like a category error. They also don’t ratify web standards, for example.
- verdverm 10mo ago
  IETF maintains the HTTP standard https://httpwg.org/ https://httpwg.org/ IETF is involved in protocol standards, MCP/A2A are certainly in this category, skills less so

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 10mo ago

When the AI investment dollars run out. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." (Chuck Prince, Citigroup)

isoprophlex 10mo ago

MCP: we're uber, but for stdout

Etheryte 10mo ago
Good job, reading this sentence physically hurts my eyes.

hugs 10mo ago

the tech industry is forever in denial that it is also actually a fashion industry.

pixl97 10mo ago
Beyond assembly everything is window dressing.
- esafak 10mo ago
  The fractal nature of https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ ...
recursive 10mo ago
That's only true for companies that make most of their money from investment instead of customers. Those exist too.
- falcor84 10mo ago
  What do you mean? Are you saying that customers don't follow fashions?

beoberha 10mo ago

It’s a fast moving field. People aren’t coming up with new ideas to be performative. They see issues with the state of the art and make something that may or may not advance things forward. MCP is huge for getting agents to do things in the “real world”. However, it’s costly! Skills is a cheap way to fill that gap for many cases. People are finding immediate value in both of these. Try not to be so pessimistic.

verdverm 10mo ago
It's not pessimism, but actual compatibility issues like deno vs npm package ecosystems that didn't work together for many years There are multiple AGENTS vs CLAUDE vs .github/instructions; skills vs commands; ... intermixed and inconsistent concepts, all out in the wild When I work on a project, do all the files align? If I work in an org, where developers have agent choice, how many of these instructions and skills "distros" do I need to put (pollute?) my repo with?
- ffsm8 10mo ago
  Depending on your workflow, none. While I do agentic development in personal projects a lot at this point, at work it's super rare beyond quick lookups to things I should already know but can't be arsed to remember exactly (like writing a one-off SQL scripts which does batching mutations and similar)
- detkin 10mo ago
  Skills have been really helpful in my team as we've been encoding tribal knowledge into something that other developers can easily take advantage of. For example, our backend architecture has these hidden patterns, that once encoding in a skill, can be followed by full stack devs doing work there, saving a ton of time in coding and PR review. We then hit the problem of how to best share these and keep them up to date, especially with multiple repositories. It led us to build sx - https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx https://github.com/sleuth-io/sx, a package manager for AI tools.

wiseowise 10mo ago

> full-blown JavaScript circus It is not healthy when you have an obsession this bad, seriously. Seek help.

veunes 10mo ago

There's definitely a performative vibe to a lot of it right now