Posted by blazarquasar 1 day ago
I was looking at this project a couple of months ago, and I did not understand why not use Kubernetes instead of rebuilding the abstractions. The reason is that Kubernetes already provides other abstractions to run services and batch job, gang scheduling, gpu and other accelerators enabled workflow.
Personally I think that this kind of workload is better off not being tied too much into kubernetes. I've worked with crossplane and other controller who put a lot of load on the k8s-apiserver and etcd and can easily slow the whole machinery down / grind them to a halt.
btw, agent-substrate is in the process of being moved to CNCF: https://github.com/cncf/sandbox/issues/523
* More efficient usage of compute by timeslicing agents (Substrate Actors), which requires fast suspend and resume (using gVisor or cloud-hypervisor snapshots), as well as keeping the K8s control plane out of the critical path (so agents can't be stored as resources in the K8s database).
* Deep inspection of outgoing requests using an egress gateway
* Minimizing the exposure of credentials to unpredictable agent control (so they can't upload access tokens to pastebin).
Achieving those goals ultimately required a significantly different design from Agent Sandbox.
tens, hundreds, maybe a couple thousand at a time? absolutely.
Pick one.
Not sure if this is an extension of tech they already have had in their systems, but I've experimenting with it to build my own orchestrator and it's been a pretty neat set of tools and abstractions so far.
Overall I agree though, this is a bit of an abuse of that concept.
EDIT: I'm sure op is familiar with this workflow but I'm being overly verbose to clarify what I think they mean and my thoughts.
Even if you confine yourself to a dev workstation, having 5 agents concurrently building testing deploying code makes your computer loud and/or hot.
EDIT: if I HAD to use YAML, I'd prefer KYAML: https://dev.to/mechcloud_academy/goodbye-yaml-hell-meet-kyam...
With that said, I’ll somewhat disagree with you. I’ve been down the path you’re talking about and while it is incredibly flexible and powerful, it became too difficult to maintain, and too inconsistent between workflow runs, and a pretty hefty waste of tokens to use AI on things that could instead be handled by deterministic scripts. I ended up creating an orchestrator for myself that uses skills as the primary way to tell agents how to execute a step in a workflow, but also directly orchestrates running scripts and managing state in a deterministic way rather than leaving it all up to agents.
If you are using Qwen 27B you need very prescriptive skills.
If you are using Astra you usually want very minimal skills (because it will follow them but be unnecessarily constrained in some contexts)
If you are using Fable then it depends - it will take the skills as general guidelines but ignore them a lot more than Astra does. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not at all.