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Posted by blazarquasar 1 day ago

AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator(agentexecutor.io)
647 points | 295 commentspage 2
aleksandrm 1 day ago|
I looked at the website, and I still don't understand the purpose.
badatnames 1 day ago||
Everything is always better with more YAML, are you perhaps new to this industry?

Next we also need an instruction style guide and CoC. It's important to treat your agents with respect. I almost forgot, the YAML template meta-language to YAML the YAML. Then we will need a foundation employing 12 FTEs to maintain it all and of course to run the certification process. You are certified, right? Statistics show a 10x increased chance of an agent going rogue and hacking competitors if it has been mistreated or been run in an unvalidated sandbox. It goes without saying the sandbox certification process is separate and must be repeated yearly by a trusted third party auditing company.

kkotak 1 day ago|||
The best part of all of this is the most if not all people have no idea what the hell is going on when every day a new paradigm/tooling/harness emerges. It's hard to keep up. On the plus side, it's a great equalizer.
pprotas 1 day ago|||
Offload the work of an LLM agent to a box in the cloud, so it doesn’t run on your laptop. This has security benefits (no access to your laptop’s files) and you can scale it up (run a lot of agents at the same time).

Then put a “sandbox” around these agents, that word has many meanings. In this case they fence the network traffic, so likely some kind of allowlist for network requests so that the agent doesn’t exfil crap to random websites. They also limit the resource limits of the sandbox, so that is beneficial to the cost of running these agents.

mirekrusin 1 day ago|||
k8s, but for agents

must look cool for people who want to solve every problem with k8s

it starts with interesting misnomers like "Task" which is not a work item but a sandbox.

"billions of tasks" is a "solution" to problem nobody has (maybe some RL labs? but they solve it other way and with orders of magnitude better optimizations).

freezes design too early – unless they'll actually focus on developing it and make tons of breaking changes it looks shit.

shared state in the same workspace, identity, authority, etc – stuff like that needs to be solved

prologic 1 day ago||
Same. I don't get it.
TomGarden 1 day ago||
Question: What is Google's track record for where their open source releases end up over time?

Genuinely not knowledgeable here

blazarquasar 1 day ago||
It depends on where they decide to go with it, I guess. Kubernetes, Go, Tensorflow, Chromium, gRPC are some examples that obviously went incredibly well.
accidc 1 day ago|||
Or if it becomes commercially valuable, then you can expect Google to take a third direction (embrace, extend, extinguish) : a la their current approach with android
surajrmal 23 hours ago||
I don't think that phrase means what you think it does. That only makes sense when there exists an open standard which a company builds an implementation for. Android was built from scratch and there was no standard.
calebkaiser 1 day ago||||
Yeah I'm actually less hesitant to try out Google open source projects than I am new Google products. I have no idea if this is accurate or just my impression, but I feel like I've been burned by the "killed by Google" meme almost exclusively on their software products, whereas there are plenty of open source efforts from Google that I think of as stable.

In addition to the ones you listed, I'd add the V8 runtime, Jax, Protobuf. Even some of their projects that wound up declining in market share (Angular, Tensorflow--both losing share to projects that wound up at Meta, ironically) are still actively maintained and pushed.

But I'm sure there's also a huge graveyard of open source projects they abandoned that just never hit my radar. Still, at least with their open source stuff, you can fork in the worst case.

schainks 1 day ago|||
Don't forget `cgroups`, eh? That was a huge Linux contribution.

or Android Open Source Project?

AlexErrant 1 day ago|||
Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

surajrmal 23 hours ago||
There is an assumption that AOSP is how OEMs receive Android updates from Google. However I am not sure that is the case. GrapheneOS is perhaps a minority player due to lack of hardware which they can use to get into a partnership agreement and advanced access.
joemazerino 1 day ago||
Maintain it briefly then slowly let it die.
neuronexmachina 1 day ago|||
A recent example was the Google workspace CLI, which was maintained for just a month: https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
Mond_ 1 day ago|||
My understanding is that this one was never really "official", and that the guy who released it wasn't following standard procedures. That's not even the official Google github account.
verdverm 1 day ago|||
yet they "maintain" the pinned state on the org page

https://github.com/googleworkspace

hustwindmaple 1 day ago|||
more like create a big launch for promo, then maintain it briefly then slowly let it die
jandrese 1 day ago||
That's not fair. Sometimes they kill it off quickly.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

jmathai 1 day ago||
I'm not sure why, exactly. But I don't pay any attention to news like this from Google. I don't know if there's some marketing which has me writing them off or if it's something else.

What I do know is that the Gemini integration into sheets is surprisingly incapable of performing basic tasks. This is where I expect Google to really shine. I expected Sheets + Gemini to be magical like Google Photos was. I hardly try anymore besides some basic math questions when I don't feel like inputting the formula myself.

The other thing I know is Google's propensity to sunset products. For many things, it's not a huge deal. And it may not be for this. But, why? When there are alternatives - both open and closed.

lkois 1 day ago||
Not sure if this is connected, but I've found Gemini pretty hopeless within its own notebooks. I've been doing some job applications, and added cv and docs into a notebook. I then create a new chat to say "here is a job description, help me write a cover letter" or some such.

After about 3 messages in any given chat, a follow-up to "rewrite that with a more friendly tone" will result in a letter for a completely different job from another chat within the notebook.

hypfer 1 day ago|||
This might be a blessing in disguise though, as the thing you've tasked it to do is something you should not offload to an LLM.
zigman1 1 day ago||
I told this exact thing to my gf few days ago and somehow she was mad at me for it
inquirerGeneral 1 day ago|||
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Melonai 1 day ago|||
On your Sheets + Gemini integration point, I've genuinely tried to give the Gemini integration into Google Docs & Google Sheets a chance. It is so incompetent that it is fully useless to me. I have not gotten a single correct solution each time I tried to use it, even something I consider table stakes. I often write my work reports in Vim in Markdown format, but they need to go to the corporate Google space. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many prompts I have, it was completely unable to manage the command to "convert the Markdown format markers into native Google Docs markers". And I want to note, this was 2 pages of extremely simple Markdown with no "advanced" patterns, like tables or quotes, I think all I used was heading-marks, bolding, italicizing, and code blocks. This is something I would expect even GPT 3.5 to succeed in, and even more so Luna, but somehow it destroyed the formatting throughout half the document. This leads me to believe that they apply the absolute cheapest model they have there, or they have the model a harness which can barely be considered working. I found it absurd when I found out that they suddenly made this Gemini integration an additional paid plan recently, there's absolutely no way I can consider that in good faith.
0gs 1 day ago||
sorry if this isn't it. there is a hidden global setting that defaults to off that lets docs play nice with markdown. it's in file > settings i think. super annoying even if this is no help
solidasparagus 1 day ago|||
This is an Apache 2.0 open source project
SP3269 1 day ago|||
Making Kubernetes a centre of everything. This one, they won’t sunset, because it helps selling GCP services.
Ecstatify 1 day ago|||
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zactato 16 hours ago||
I am confused by this. The UX of the CLI is almost identical to kubectl, but it doesn't seem to actually be built on K8s CRDs. There's a backend that runs on k8s, but doesn't seem natively integrated.

Because it's using `ax apple` instead of `kubectl apply` you can't use tools like argocd for managing resources.

It's built on agent substrate which is built on top of k8s CRDs, so I'm surprised.

Is the throughput of these objects too high for etcd?

ahmedtd 15 hours ago|
> Is the throughput of these objects too high for etcd?

Yes (perhaps not etcd, but the combination of kube-apiserver and etcd)

Substrate does not use CRDs for anything on the hot path of actor scheduling or resumption.

skapadia 1 day ago||
Everyone and their mother are vibe coding their own solutions like this, all the time.
zhoujinliang 1 day ago||
The real difficult in arranging agents is not to run them, but to identify the state change - to judge whether an agent stops to wait for you, or is stuck, or finished, and whether the two should be handled automatically or someone should be found. You have made this judgment for 12 agents, and you need to know how unreliable it is.
SillyUsername 1 day ago||
I've been using https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra which is pretty similar but has workflow visibility and a number of templates.

For a generic swarm, workflows aren't too useful which does away with the visibility, so I may give this a try instead.

m00x 21 hours ago|
I wonder if Google stole this code too like they did with minitap
dilyevsky 1 day ago|
Interesting, we had developed a very similar framework for our internal agents: https://github.com/apoxy-dev/clrk For us main use-case was intercepting all network I/O including LLM providers, HTTP, and random TCP/UDP calls
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