Thread

1. threecheese · 1790624270 · focus · HN ↗

   Is anyone leveraging IRC/XMPP/etc for agents or A2A communication? It seems like a natural fit; all the "human agents communicating" abstractions and underlying technology pieces are in place and mature, as are methods for dealing with unruly actors.

   I've wondered why I haven't seen this everywhere.

   1. pavo-etc · 1790657905 · focus · HN ↗

      I have a harness built on top of pi that uses XMPP for all agent communication with me and between agents[0]. It works well, I text them from my phone and from my browser (or anything else that supports xmpp). They can communicate with each other over group chats and can schedule agent tasks using a GitHub project and a cron job.

      The agents run on my NixOS server in their own unix account, this is the real secret sauce. This lets me use unix perms to limit their access to things, and it allows them to handle server administration. I've given them access to a cli mail and calendar client[1], github, and they have the ability to deploy updates whitelisted services. NixOS lets them install whatever they want in ephemeral shells, and it's not possible for them to break the server in a way I can't trivially roll back.

      They can modify the caddy config, so there have been times I've entirely built and deployed new services on a new domain from my phone on the bus.

      The harness is called pi-msg, I've done a writeup of my machine's setup on my site.[2]

      [0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zachpmanson&#x2F;pi-msg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zachpmanson&#x2F;pi-msg [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zachpmanson&#x2F;docket" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zachpmanson&#x2F;docket [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notes.zachmanson.com&#x2F;the-fleet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notes.zachmanson.com&#x2F;the-fleet&#x2F;

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