Hacker News: vichoiglesias

New comment by vichoiglesias in "Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?"

vichoiglesias — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:28:43 +0000

I managed to run a council using OpenClaw twice a day of different models that would discuss my personal projects, and send me to telegram ideas or suggestions for the next steps. It was quite cool and got very nice insights, but was burning tokens like crazy, so I stopped it.

Agent Failures Don't Start Where They Appear

vichoiglesias — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:39:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vichoiglesias.com/writing/agent-failures-dont-start-where-they-appear

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344096

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Why Understanding AI Internals Won't Explain Agent Failures

vichoiglesias — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:02:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vichoiglesias.com/writing/why-understanding-ai-internals-wont-explain-agent-failures

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253018

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by vichoiglesias in "Making Autonomous Agent Execution Bisectable"

vichoiglesias — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:13:26 +0000

The self-extending part is wild! agent mutating its own tools mid-run makes trajectory fidelity even more make-or-break.

On git hooks: checkpointing state is easy, but if replay isn’t deterministic, bisect over checkpoints is unreliable... you can get different states on replay.

Tool evolution is a brutal test case: if the predicate is “does this tool still handle edge X?”, it needs to stay violated once flipped, or binary search happily lies about the origin tick.

Genuine question: when a self-built tool regresses, can you actually reconstruct the exact chain of reasoning/commitments that led to it? The artifact is simple to diff, the decision trail behind it is where it gets nasty.

New comment by vichoiglesias in "Making Autonomous Agent Execution Bisectable"

vichoiglesias — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:57:15 +0000

When an autonomous agent fails at step 40, the bug was usually introduced at step 12. The hard part is finding it. Logs tell you what happened, but they don’t let you bisect a trajectory the way you’d bisect code.

I started thinking about what it would actually take to make that kind of debugging mechanical. It seems to require three things: immutable traces, pure reducers, and violation predicates that don’t flip back once they become true.

The interesting part: remove any one of those invariants, and there exists an execution where binary search over the trajectory cannot be guaranteed to return the correct onset tick. I tried to sketch a proof of that.

Once that substrate exists, though, you get something fun: fork, diff, and cherry-pick over agent reasoning. The same operations Git gave us over code but applied to trajectories.

Curious what breaks in the argument, especially the impossibility claim and whether the predicate regularity assumption is actually realistic.

Making Autonomous Agent Execution Bisectable

vichoiglesias — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:57:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vichoiglesias.com/writing/putting-git-on-ai-agents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171211

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Mecanic: An framework to create web-based design tools

vichoiglesias — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 18:47:30 +0000

Article URL: https://mechanic.design

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28542801

Points: 6

# Comments: 0