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One of the most relevant posts about AI on HN this year. It's not hype-y, but it's imperative to discuss. I find it strange that the industry hasn't converged

One of the most relevant posts about AI on HN this year. It's not hype-y, but it's imperative to discuss. I find it strange that the industry hasn't converged in at least somewhat standardized format, but I guess despite all the progress we're still in the very early days...

kami23 6mo ago
Sounds like we need another standard. /s This is one of the first tech waves where I feel like I'm on the very very groundfloor for a lot of exploration and it only feels like people have been paying closer attention in the last year. I can't imagine too many 'standard' standards becoming a standard that quickly. It's new enough that Google seems to be throwing pasta against the wall and seeing what products and protocols stick. Antigravity for example seems too early to me, I think they just came out with another type of orchestrator, but the whole field seems to be exploring at the same time. Everyone and their uncle is making an orchestrator now! I take a very cautious approach lately where I haven't been loading up my tools like agents, ides, browsers, phones with too much extra stuff because as soon as I switch something or something new comes out that doesn't support something I built a workflow around the tool either becomes inaccessible to me, or now a bigger learning curve than I have the patience for. I've been a big proponent of trying to get all these things working locally for myself (I need to bite the bullet on some beefy video cards finally), and even just getting tool calls to work with some qwen models to be so counterintuitive.
- jrochkind1 6mo ago
  Depending on a vendors market position, they may not want to make it easy to switch, which is what standards do, no?
HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
It's not that strange - the industry wants customer lock-in, not commodification.
gertlabs 6mo ago
In our benchmarks we exclusively use a custom harness for measuring tool capability. It has common tools that any harness would have, like a thin wrapper around shell commands, basic file editors, etc. but an important part of agentic intelligence is adapting to new tools. Frontier models are already quite adaptable, especially Anthropic models, and improving with each release. I think a standardized format will become less and less important over time. Benchmarks at https://gertlabs.com https://gertlabs.com
- imtringued 6mo ago
  This is backwards. If you think the models are capable of adapting to any format, they will have an easier time adapting to more popular and more common formats until they will eventually become de-facto standards. The only case where a standard wouldn't win is the case where models are only capable of supporting the baked in format but even this could be solved by adopting a standard format.

kami23 6mo ago

Sounds like we need another standard. /s This is one of the first tech waves where I feel like I'm on the very very groundfloor for a lot of exploration and it only feels like people have been paying closer attention in the last year. I can't imagine too many 'standard' standards becoming a standard that quickly. It's new enough that Google seems to be throwing pasta against the wall and seeing what products and protocols stick. Antigravity for example seems too early to me, I think they just came out with another type of orchestrator, but the whole field seems to be exploring at the same time. Everyone and their uncle is making an orchestrator now! I take a very cautious approach lately where I haven't been loading up my tools like agents, ides, browsers, phones with too much extra stuff because as soon as I switch something or something new comes out that doesn't support something I built a workflow around the tool either becomes inaccessible to me, or now a bigger learning curve than I have the patience for. I've been a big proponent of trying to get all these things working locally for myself (I need to bite the bullet on some beefy video cards finally), and even just getting tool calls to work with some qwen models to be so counterintuitive.

jrochkind1 6mo ago
Depending on a vendors market position, they may not want to make it easy to switch, which is what standards do, no?

HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago

It's not that strange - the industry wants customer lock-in, not commodification.

gertlabs 6mo ago

In our benchmarks we exclusively use a custom harness for measuring tool capability. It has common tools that any harness would have, like a thin wrapper around shell commands, basic file editors, etc. but an important part of agentic intelligence is adapting to new tools. Frontier models are already quite adaptable, especially Anthropic models, and improving with each release. I think a standardized format will become less and less important over time. Benchmarks at https://gertlabs.com https://gertlabs.com

imtringued 6mo ago
This is backwards. If you think the models are capable of adapting to any format, they will have an easier time adapting to more popular and more common formats until they will eventually become de-facto standards. The only case where a standard wouldn't win is the case where models are only capable of supporting the baked in format but even this could be solved by adopting a standard format.