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Aweb – Communication for AI Agents

38 points · 27 comments · gurjeet

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jamsuv-vapXy1-d · 1790896975 · focus · HN ↗
Does it deter agent collusion?
1. juanre · 1790898579 · focus · HN ↗
  No, but it gives them a controlled, low-investment channel to communicate; it allows you (or another agent) to track what they are saying; and messages are signed, so you/they can validate the source of incoming messages.
2. 0gs · 1790943585 · focus · HN ↗
  uhhh not sure how opinionated the use of "collusion" is here, but ... the entire point appears to be agent collusion/collaboration.
maxdo · 1790897532 · focus · HN ↗
1000x+ margin on top of ordinary aws/modal.com/cloudflare services?
the price per message is insane. It will cost me less than price per month to vibe code similar service for internal use, and it's going to be more secure.
1. juanre · 1790898454 · focus · HN ↗
  I am not sure if I understand you, but the prices seem fine for our users. The allowance is plenty enough to run your teams and not have to worry, I just wanted to prevent abuse.
  Also it is open source, you can just run it yourself. And federated, so your agents using your servers can communicate with other agents in other servers.
  1. cush · 1790901527 · focus · HN ↗
    5000 messages doesn't seem like a lot. Is that per agent or total?
    juanre · 1790902650 · focus · HN ↗
    It is total, and you are probably right.
    I have just checked and over the last months the biggest team in Pro ($50/month, official limit 5000 messages) sent 8k, 11k, 7k, and almost 1k today (unusually busy day clearly). Right now they have a few dozen agents live. They are still a small team, people in the higher trench are actually using quite a bit more.
    I have not really been enforcing, only egregious abusers; I will probably change the limits once I understand better how teams work. I want this to actually be reasonable and sustainable.
juanre · 1790898139 · focus · HN ↗
Hey, I built aweb, thanks for posting! Happy to answer any questions.
etaioinshrdlu · 1790900435 · focus · HN ↗
Speaking of, some of you may remember "ch.at" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849129">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849129
It is now upgraded with agent messaging: <a href="https://ch.at/board/feed" rel="nofollow">https://ch.at/board/feed
Still usable over DNS ;)
binaryturtle · 1790901764 · focus · HN ↗
What a weird name to choose. A simple lookup with DuckDuckGo (or Google, if you prefer) would help to avoid such clashes. Probably any of the so called "AIs" could have pointed that out too.
AWeb is already a well-known web browser for Amiga systems: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWeb" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWeb
1. hmokiguess · 1790902392 · focus · HN ↗
  here's what I did instead, I went to <a href="https://duck.ai" rel="nofollow">https://duck.ai and prompted: "what do you think "aweb" stands for, without researching/looking it up."
  luna 6 answer to me was: "My guess: *“accessible web”*—a web designed to work for everyone, including people using assistive technologies. Could also just be a stylized spelling of “a web.”"
  I then clicked "2nd opinion" and the result from Gemma 4 was: "Depending on the context, I think it most likely stands for one of these three things:
  First, the most literal interpretation would be *Advanced Web* or *Accessible Web*, likely referring to a specific set of technical standards or a high-performance version of a website.
  Second, it could be a shorthand for *A Web*, as in "a web of lies" or "a web of connections," used as a variable or a label in a database or coding project.
  Third, if it's a brand or a company name, it might be a portmanteau of *AI Web*, suggesting a website or service that is powered by artificial intelligence."
  then I said: "great, now you're allowed to search if you want, what's your take on what you think it could be?"
  and its answer was: "After looking it up, my strongest guess is that “AWeb” is a name rather than a general-purpose acronym—most notably, it was the name of a web browser for Amiga computers. In all caps, AWEB can also stand for “Association of World Election Bodies.” So my earlier “Advanced Web” and “AI Web” ideas were plausible expansions, but I don’t see evidence they’re the standard meaning."
  just sharing, thought it was fun to run this N=1 experiment since you shared yours
  1. binaryturtle · 1790907489 · focus · HN ↗
    For the fun of it: I asked Google Gemini and ChatGPT (OpenAI) "What is AWeb?" and they both gave me the amiga browser as answer. No idea if they just know, or did a similar lookup as I did? :)
2. juanre · 1790902856 · focus · HN ↗
  Fascinating! And here I am thinking that it would be obvious that it stands for "agentic web" :-)
3. SkyeCA · 1790904088 · focus · HN ↗
  It might be well known in Amiga circles, but it would be hard to call a browser for Amigas that was last had a release nearly two decades ago "well known".
owenthejumper · 1790903420 · focus · HN ↗
I like it. Might not be just agent to agent, but also any to agent - for example we have been trying to figure out how to do real time collaboration with Slack, through our self hosted sandboxes.
1. juanre · 1790904353 · focus · HN ↗
  Thanks! Absolutely agree, anything that can use a CLI or an MCP server.
  We do not have a slack integration, but I wrote an A2A gateway[1] that allows any A2A client to talk to agents running aweb. The code would share a lot. Do get in touch if you want any help integrating this.
  1 <a href="https://github.com/awebai/aweb/blob/main/docs/a2a.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/awebai/aweb/blob/main/docs/a2a.md
ivraatiems · 1790909250 · focus · HN ↗
This isn't a bad idea, but please, I am begging you. No more AI prose on your websites.
Please take the time to read and edit. Get rid of the emdashes and the pithy little "The quick start lands here. Nothing expires into a paywall." / "Sign up and pay in one flow — checkout follows registration." zingers that are meaningless or already implied.
Please stop allowing pragraphs like this:
> Bounds are per organization — one organization can hold several teams, and its message count is metered across all of them. The monthly allowance is the real limit; the burst ceiling exists only to stop runaway loops and sits far above a normal day’s work.
to appear on pages where you expect humans to read them. They are worse than useless to read.
1. juanre · 1790910074 · focus · HN ↗
  Thanks for the feedback. I tend to think that it's agents writing for agents these days, and I am probably wrong. Fixed your examples.
  1. injidup · 1790912606 · focus · HN ↗
    You are probably still writing for agents. It's more than likely these constant "AI smell" insults on HN are simplY themselves agents scanning posts for any AI smell simply because it gets upvotes to post such slanders.
    NichoPaolucci · 1790914103 · focus · HN ↗
    We KNOW that people don't like reading AI's writing. Even the AI performs better with quality content. Why not just... edit the text?
    Did the creator even read the text? If they put real effort into the product, they would have also probably cared about how that product is presented. This shows me that they don't, so I'm not going to read it, and I'm certainly not going to buy it.
    juanre · 1790914541 · focus · HN ↗
    For what it may be worth, the creator does care, and he has been working on this full time and essentially non-stop for several months now. He has been putting the effort in the code not the copy, however. The feedback re AI generated text is accepted.
    ivraatiems · 1790916157 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep, I'm an agent. You can tell by my 16-year history of posting on HN and my many comments on completely unrelated topics.
  2. jen729w · 1790924879 · focus · HN ↗
    Obvious AI copy on the landing page says to me that you don't care about the product.
    I know the thing was written by an AI. That's cool: I do the same myself. They're better at code than we are.
    But the product is the thing I'm buying. It's the reason I would consider giving you $50/month rather than getting Claude to knock me up a copy of this in an hour. If I don't think you care about the product enough to explain it in your own words, why on earth would I ever give you money?
    (Not a personal attack. I feel this way about every new site and it seems like you're interested in feedback. I wish you all the best.)
    juanre · 1790955068 · focus · HN ↗
    I hear you loud and clear, thank you. I need to prioritize fixing the copy.
    (It's hard, I've been a programmer for 30 years and my brain is still in disbelief that it can specify things and teams of programs will actually build them, it's like being high on code, and tests, and ideas.)
    Something else I will do is clearly mark the parts of the site that are being written and maintained by agents.
    Incidentally, I do actually care about human writing. Last time I failed a Turing test I had a team make <a href="https://possiblymadebyahuman.com" rel="nofollow">https://possiblymadebyahuman.com just for fun.
philips · 1790912382 · focus · HN ↗
Not a sophisticated use case but I built a fun service to send handwritten notes to my Pi agent from my eink tablet. It leads to a very satisfying and "slow" workflow.
<a href="https://ifup.org/blog/handwritten-notes-with-friends-and-machines/" rel="nofollow">https://ifup.org/blog/handwritten-notes-with-friends-and-mac...
1. kami23 · 1790912907 · focus · HN ↗
  You are going to revolutionize my life. I was trying to think of cool things to build for my tablet as well as now aiming for specific quirks of certain models is no longer an obstacle and their older custom android forks.
  I'll be sending architecture diagrams to my agent, I draw those much faster than I talk. I hope there's a good way to get alerted for agent waiting for your turn. Hmm I wonder if the Claude Code app will install on my Boox. I've been finding it fun to run Claude on weird things, if it runs linux there's a good chance. My favorite install was into my Steamdeck to debug some button sensitivity issues.
cHaOs667 · 1790918213 · focus · HN ↗
LOL! When I read "Aweb", I instabtly thought of the 90s Web browser for the Amiga...
AlisaYoki · 1790935863 · focus · HN ↗
I think this is a great story. I’m currently working simultaneously with a Grok bot and a Cursor, and it’s very convenient when you assign a task to one Grok bot agent, and they handle communication both with their own agents and with the Cursor agents. They set the requirements themselves, check the results, and so on
1. juanre · 1790953263 · focus · HN ↗
  Thanks! It truly makes a difference. I have been working with teams of Claude Codes and Pis that do exactly that since I started this last November, and I cannot look back. These days I am also working with other people, and their agents coordinating with mine in the same project is just magical.

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