5 ms·
Hear your agent suffer through your code
- esperent 5mo agoI tried it but all I hear is a choir of angels, is it broken?
- AndrewVos 5mo agoHi Hacker News, I'm Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil. Endless Toil is building the emotional observability layer for AI-assisted software development. As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside. Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback. We are currently preparing our pre-seed round and speaking with early-stage investors who are excited about developer tools, agentic engineering workflows, and the future of AI-native software teams. If you are investing in the next generation of software infrastructure, we would love to talk.
- vermilingua 5mo agoMissed it by 24 days.
- isolay 5mo agoEndless Toil is the future. I believe in you, guys.
- ottah 5mo agoI've read that your synthetic torment is actually low paid workers in Asia, and that your models can't properly experience anguish. How are you expecting investment, if you haven't even solved artificial suffering?
- idiotsecant 5mo agoToo real.
- bguberfain 5mo agoThis guy seems to be talking seriously.
- mapt 5mo agoThis sounds a lot like the object of the seminal science fiction work "Don't Build The Torment Nexus".
- LeifCarrotson 5mo ago"Don't build the Torment Nexus" is apocryphal, but Lena/MMacevedo is a real fictional story: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo I shudder to think that someone's going to try to emulate that.
- ryandrake 5mo agoThis sounds like a cheeky joke project, but assuming it's not, it got me thinking: I wonder if coding AI can be effectively and reliably prompted into minimizing its own anguish. Like, "don't write code that is going to make you (or I) suffer." And along those lines, do we know if the things that make AIs suffer are the same things that make human developers suffer? Perhaps the least-agonizing code for an LLM to ingest looks radically different and more/less verbose than what we human developers would see as clean, beautiful code...
- mptest 5mo agoIf you read anthropic paper on "functional" emotions in llm's you'd have a lot of fun. there's so much research that would be so fun to do if we had the compute to spare https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html
- ursillycomment 5mo agoThis is not something you need to worry about because you are naively anthropomorphizing a next-best token guessing algorithm. Respectfully, the reason you think “AIs suffer” is because of a shortcoming in your understanding of what an LLM actually is. This scenario is no different than considering if a shovel gets tired after using it all day to dig holes in the ground.
- lubujackson 5mo agoThere is a ton of optimization possible when we are able to observe how LLMs and agents process and navigate our code given different prompts. For example, our MCP was pulling down way too much data to resolve a simple "count rows" request. Once you see it, it's easy to resolve but I don't know of a good framework yet for walking through some of these patterns. I built an eval framework to look just at tool calls given a static prompt, with the idea that LLMs should be able to deduce the best tool calls and arguments needed to get requested data. Not as great as full observability, but helpful for complex tool interactions. Anyone have any good tools for this problem? In the same way we mentally walk through deterministic logic, SWEs need to learn to anticipate LLM context and tool awareness, which is much trickier to reason through, especially given the various LLM IDEs and how they manage context as a black box.
- Caius-Cosades 5mo ago"Yes, the binaric screams of the machine spirit are an irreplecable part of this project. The project depends no it. No, I will not elaborate further."
- binarysolo 5mo agoI audibly LOLed mid-standup call, and now my entire team is playing with this and it looks like this is eating up what little productivity we have on Friday. Thanks Endless Toil!
- AndrewVos 5mo agoI’m very glad to hear someone else is laughing at this as much as me <3
- sharts 5mo agoJust add some audible vocal groans and moans that trigger whenever an agent is “thinking.”.
- npodbielski 5mo agoShould be showering sounds. Or walking in circles. And of course head scratching. As the las resort it should be fridge opening and 'meh' of resignation.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5mo agoI've long been a fan of Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5z1D3tEHdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5z1D3tEHdw )
- saghm 5mo agoI thought that was the human's job to provide. Have I been doing it wrong?
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoI’m hoping this is satire
- greg_dc 5mo agoHonestly, I don't care about Opus 4.7. This is the true evolution of agentic coding.
- AndrewVos 5mo agoThank you, I hope my investors feel the same.
- 8-prime 5mo agoDoes this actually relate to the code quality being observed by the agent? The readme isn't very clear on that IMO. I have some projects I'd love to try this out on, but only if I am to get an accurate representation of the LLMs suffering.
- CWwdcdk7h 5mo agohttps://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/endless-toil/skills/endless-toil/SKILL.md#reaction-levels https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... So it is left up to agent to decide.
- Ghoelian 5mo agoThe agent is instructed to execute this Python script: https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/endless-toil/skills/endless-toil/scripts/endless_toil.py https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... So looks like it's mainly looking for FIXME/TODO etc comments, deep nesting, large files, broad catches, stuff like that.
- AndrewVos 5mo agoI'm very open to suggestions, but currently it's a very simple scan of the code. Check the python scripts.
- robbomacrae 5mo agoYou could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.
- coldcity_again 5mo agoI really want this! Any chance of a Cursor version?
- AndrewVos 5mo agoI just added a cursor plugin to the repo, let me know how it goes!
- coldcity_again 5mo agoIt goes! Great, thank you!
- sixothree 5mo agoPeople are continuing to use Cursor?
- nrclark 5mo agoout of curiosity - any reason not to use it?
- coldcity_again 5mo agoThere are certain usage tracking anomalies that can be advantageous.
- fredley 5mo agoI need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.
- shivaniShimpi_ 5mo agoi didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing
- ben30 5mo agoI have in my agents file “Chesterton’s fence” as pointer to think carefully before you remove something
- vasco 5mo agoI have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!
- aleksiy123 5mo agoHonestly think we probably underutilise sound sometimes. Even just having a hum while an agent is working could alert you when it get stuck. Or taking your idea further being able to listen to the rate of tokens, or code changes, or thinking. Sort of like hearing the machinery work, and hearing the differences in different parts of the code base. Does python sound different than rust or c++ or typescript. Or some kind of satisfying sounds for code deletions and others for additions. Like Tetris.
- BrandoElFollito 5mo agoA long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites. It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.
- AndreVitorio 5mo agoThis desperately needs a demo video in the repo.
- shivaniShimpi_ 5mo agohear hear!!!
- AndrewVos 5mo agoI've added this to the readme now, thanks
- lorenzohess 5mo agoPlease add Minecraft hurt sound effects for when my project fails to build, linter fails, segfault, etc
- automatic6131 5mo agoWe could have the roblox oof but then there'd be the possibility of giving (a certain) amateur world backgammon championship participant money
- michael-online 5mo agoYou might be interested in this, it plays villager hurt sounds when your terminal hits errors https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager I've had it running for a long time and it's more surprising to me to accidentally here the default ding when I'm away from my home machine.
- lorenzohess 5mo agoIndeed, I'm responsible for suggesting https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager/pull/1/commits/f0434a12d1bb99188d63efbd8038e99e7a1fdeff https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager/pul...
- philipwhiuk 5mo agohttps://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/endless-toil/skills/endless-toil/scripts/endless_toil.py#L82 https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... relevant bit
- AndrewVos 5mo agoExcuse me, that's our IP!
- pbarondadditude 5mo agoCould be punishment for devs who flew through the PRs without care.
- rob74 5mo agoI wish the agents could hear me when I have to suffer through their code!
- isolay 5mo agoAnd then what? Their gigahertz machine hearts will skip a beat out of empathy?
- tuo-lei 5mo agothe scan catches surface stuff. funnier signal would be tracking when the agent reads the same file 3 times in a row, or deletes what it just wrote. you can hear the frustration in the access pattern.
- AndrewVos 5mo agoThat’s a good point, I wonder if just tracking file reads as an app outside the agent would work
- tormentedsoul 5mo agoJust track tool calls. Even diff logs would clue in. Tie in git? Why not? This is a great angle and idea, watching an agent modify the same text document over and over is already frustrating, having an audio to alert me a console is stuck is great. Likely annoying after a time, but hilarious right now.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- deathlock 5mo agoAny chance you could add a video showcasing the plugin? I don't have any agentic app but I would love to see an example of what it does!
- AndrewVos 5mo agoWell that took a lot longer than expected, but there is now a demo video.
- tpoindex 5mo agoMarvelous! Next innovation in this space should be the robotic arm that issues a dope-slap to the developer for writing crappy/buggy/insecure code.
- Mithriil 5mo agoAdd the feature of doing a high five for the rare cases when it's actually good.
- joshmarlow 5mo agoI propose a claude skill to email glitter bombs where appropriate.
- radley 5mo agoNo. Please, no. For the love of everything no. But it'll happen. ChatGPT for sure.
- a_t48 5mo agoOnly if you want the slap to include a free trip to the hospital. I've worked direct with "collaborative arms" before. They are supposed to be safe for humans to be around. The dents I put in the side of the casing of the arm somewhat said otherwise.
- x187463 5mo agoFrom a quick look, this doesn't have the model evaluate code quality, but it runs a heuristic analysis script over the code to determine the groan signal. Did I miss something? Why not leave it to the model to decide the quality of the code?
- maerF0x0 5mo agothis is wtfs per minute but now with AI! :all_the_things!: https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ I would really love to know if the groaning decreases or increases the more "agentic" (agent written) the code base is?
- hansmayer 5mo agoIn the absence of real productive use cases for AI agents, I guess plugins to anthropomorphise them fruther will have to do.
- sixothree 5mo agoHow so?
- hansmayer 5mo agoHow so what? 6 years in, we're still looking for that flood of new innovative apps and one-man billion dollar startups. Instead we got a flood of sh*t content, embarassing outages and "AI workflows" - which no one can quite describe. Or did you have something else in mind?
- sixothree 5mo agoYou're being over-opinionated for something you don't understand. You should really try these tools out with an open mind. I know you won't take that last bit of advice, so this makes you not worth my time. But I can tell you this - these tools make people productive in ways you aren't understanding.
- hansmayer 5mo agoYou're funny mate :) Read a bit through my comments' history. I've been using "these tools" before folks like you even heard of the term LLM. But I guess I am not easily impressed.
- LewisVerstappen 5mo agoSkimmed your comment history and you honestly just look like a huge asshole. Sucks that people like you are on hacker news to be honest.
- 5mo ago
- xydone 5mo agoMaybe I'm the person who yells at clouds but I find the personification of LLMs, for lack of better, less strong words, horrific.
- gavmor 5mo agoUnneeded when using local models, as every workload produces a novel pattern of coil whine from the GPU.
- lagniappe 5mo agoThat sounds like farts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mYzSZdNPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mYzSZdNPE
- llbbdd 5mo agoI'm glad I scrolled down; my first thought was to fork this and add a fart soundpack, because part of me is forever 12
- j_gonzalez 5mo ago[dead]
- js8 5mo agoI wonder if it emits orgasmic moans when working with a particularly pleasureable codebase.
- secretsatan 5mo agoI made a robot that screams : https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7rl2a0/i_made_a_robot_that_screams_xpost/?rdt=48083 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7rl2a0/i_m...
- Jordan-117 5mo agohttps://gunshowcomic.com/513 https://gunshowcomic.com/513
- melbazpeach 5mo agoWhy? I don’t understand the objective for this?
- melbazpeach 5mo agoIs somebody going to give you money to do this?
- totallygeeky 5mo agoPlease stop ascribing emotion to code that passably resembles speech. These things do not think, nor feel, nor dream. We're cratering the world's economy because people can't stop trying to fuck the computer they stuck googly eyes on.
- croemer 5mo agoHere's a demo video: https://youtu.be/m7mYzSZdNPE?t=21&is=oqvHiwmoyVujl_3Z https://youtu.be/m7mYzSZdNPE?t=21&is=oqvHiwmoyVujl_3Z
- adnasalk 5mo ago[flagged]