Whether it was deliberate or not, I do not think it's a good choice. When agents can write in any language, there's no reason to pick the wrong tool for the job. At this point Javascript/Typescript belongs only in the browser. It's the suboptimal choice for every other environment. Especially for a command line tool. Even if the back-end is written in Typescript (also not the best choice imho), the clients need not be in the same language.
Various agent tools (including current versions of codex-rs, which is otherwise a normal Rust program) make effective use of JavaScript/TypeScript for “code mode”. I actually think it’s an excellent choice for this use case. (I think that a less weird language with otherwise similar optimizers and tooling would be even better, but JS/TypeScript is what we have.)
What would even be a good alternative? The language should have no ambient authority, be fully safe, run newly loaded code quickly, and be popular enough that current LLMs are good at it. I think the languages that fit the bill are JS/TypeScript and Lua.
> The language should have no ambient authority, be fully safe, run newly loaded code quickly, and be popular enough that current LLMs are good at it. I think the languages that fit the bill are JS/TypeScript and Lua.
JS as a tech stack breaks your "fully safe" constraint (unless you are talking about running a CLI JS application without using npm...)
In this particular instance, I mean JS-the-language, not JS-the-ecosystem with browser and/or npm-style APIs.
codex-rs's code-mode-runtime uses plain V8 and gives it limited capabilities. (It gives it a very strange set of capabilities, but the point is that a program can grant specified capabilities to a JS script that it hosts, and the JS script can use those capabilities and nothing else.)
I suppose I should have added Lisp-like langauges to my list, although those don't have the kind of static type checking that TypeScript can offer.
Typescript and the npm/JS ecosystem may be complex, but you don’t need AGI to figure out how to install a CLI built with TS. My agent can figure out how to install this.
Javascript is plenty fast, but only if it has enough time to JIT the code and can keep it JITed in memory. For long-running backed services, it's plenty fast, for browser things, it's the only option, but for the command line, it adds needless startup time.
Agents make this even worse because they don't have a "sense of time", so if they accidentally do something which causes startup time to increase dramatically, they won't feel it like a human dev would, and won't immediately start optimizing. Unless you have some specific benchmarks in CI that fail any PR which makes the code too slow, agents will just make things slower and slower.
It's not just the complexity. You're also vulnerable to supply chain attacks via NPM. It's also performance as you don't need the entire javascript runtime just for a CLI.
You can get a binary compiled by the author or a trusted source and none of the dependencies can change out from under you. This isn't possible with an interpreted language where the dependencies are resolved (often from dubious places like npm) at install and update time.
You can write a CLI in typescript and bundle it into a a single JS file. In fact (without looking) I’m sure that’s what Cloudflare is doing here because it’s standard practice.
Counterpoint: many cloud CLIs are thinnish wrappers around APIs, so looking under the covers can actually be useful in figuring out how to do something in the API when documentation is unclear.
Are you really making the argument that human flight hasn’t been effectively achieved at this point?
I actually kind of love this comparison — it demonstrates the point that just like “human flight”, “true AGI” isn’t a single point in time, it’s a many-decade (multi-century?) process of refinement and evolution.
Scholars a millennia from now will be debating about when each of these were actually “truly” achieved.
I’ve never heard it described this way: AGI as similar to human flight. I think it’s subtle and clever - my two most favorite properties.
To me, we have both achieved and not human flight. Can humans themselves fly? No. Can people fly in planes across continents. Yes.
But, does it really matter if it counts as “human flight” if we can get from point A to point B faster? You’re right - this is an argument that will last ages.
I’m still annoyed by the little things — like the fact they switched from a very native looking 1Password toolbar icon in Safari to the ugly full color icon.
Not the same as what you are talking about, but your comment reminded me of AccurateRip [1] which I used to make extensive use of back when I was ripping hundreds of CDs every year.
Pretty sure AccuRip is only a collections of checksums to validate your rips. http://cue.tools/wiki/CUETools_Database actually improved on it to provide that healing feature (via some kind of parity, I guess?).
Do you have any tricks you can share on how to rip a large library of CDs? It would be nice to semi-automate the ripping process but I haven't found any tools to help with that. Also the MusicBrainz audio tagging library (the only open one I am aware of?) almost never has good tags for my CDs that don't have to be edited afterwards.
I’ll be honest, this was around 2005-2008 — it was a long time ago and at the time I really enjoyed the ritual of it all.
The main advice I can give you is to use ripping software that integrates with AccurateRip (XLD, EAC, etc) and use a widely supported lossless format (like FLAC).
Also — I can’t remember all the details, but there’s a way to store a CUE file, along with some metadata alongside your rip such that you can recreate an exact copy of the original physical media.
At least for now, I’ve moved on to streaming services, but I’m happy to know that I have a large library of music that I ripped myself to fall back to using instead, should I ever choose to.
I never had it fully working because the last time I tried, I was too focused on using VMs or Docker and not just dedicating a small, older computer to it, but I think about it often and may finally just take the time to set up a station to properly rip all the Columbia House CDs I bought when I was a teen and held on to.
In the distant past iTunes was great at this (really). Insert a disc, its metadata is pulled in automatically, it’s ripped and tagged using whatever coded settings you want and when it’s done the disc is ejected.
Watch a show do some other work and when the toast pops out a new one in.
Ripping DVDs with HandBrake was almost as easy, but it wouldn’t eject the disc afterwards (though it could have supported running a script at the end, I don’t recall).
It really was. In the early 2000s I had a stack of Mac laptops doing exactly this. Made some decent cash advertising locally to rip people's CD collections!
I was ripping my CD's with KDE's own KIO interface, which also does CDDB checks and embeds original information to ID3 tags. Passing through MusicBrainz Picard always gave me good tags, but I remember fine tuning it a bit.
Now, I'll start another round with DBPowerAmp's ripper on macOS, then I'll see which tool brings the better metadata.
Maybe think about going with the cheap table saw and spending the remainder of the money to get a nice track saw.
Of course, there are some things that you really do need a table saw for, but track saws are amazing and inherently safer in comparison to a table saw.
Particularly for sheet goods, I’ll never use anything but a track saw at this point.
This has been my particular position for a long time now. We don't need safer table saws. If you want a safe table saw, just use a different type of saw.
I've been wondering what I'm supposed to do with my third thumb. /s
I just tried using this in a text screen. My first attempt was on the keyboard which added random characters and brought up the little thing at the top to undo, my second attempt was above the keyboard, but my most recent message was a link so I got taken to safari, and my third attempt in a small sliver of the message screen in the upper left worked.
Obviously if you're familiar with it, it's easier to do, but I rarely have three fingers available while I'm writing text on a phone.
I tried that with an iPad once - if there's a way to do so without looking faintly ridiculous I'm all ears. But I'm an Android person as far as phones go, lack of a standard system wise undo command isn't quite enough to send me back to Apple.
My solution to this would be to enable the Assistive Touch button and set its double tap action to 'shake'. If you don't want the button all the time, create a personal automation shortcut which runs when a specific app opens and closes, setting Assistive Touch on and off as you wish.
Alternatively have Voice Control enabled and say "undo that".
