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- Hacker News
- Simple task-specific CLI tools that your agent builds for itself are usually lower-friction than yet another Universal Thing Doer standard. As a bonus, human operators also benefit.
> The MHS driver also helps an AI agent understand how to use a device it has never seen before, giving it information about machine characteristics that may not be discernable from code alone (for example, the weight of a robot arm, which is important for knowing how to manipulate it safely).
I physically flinched when I read this. VLA, JEPA, sure, they make sense. Is connecting an LLM to a robot arm and say "perform this complex physical manipulation task by issuing text-based commands, make no mistakes" really the right abstraction?
by wren6991 - So something like what happened with Cyberdyne Systems. So, by the time AI becomes self-conscious, it will already have the physical capabilities to control manufacturing and replication. Good times. Terminator arriving any time now from the future. :)
Anyway, my company is already looking into using MHS
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by megous - How is this different from tool calls? Or rather, MCP?by shay_ker
- Sounds like PyLabRobot:
- As far as I can tell is these standards (MCP/MHS/etc) are just semi obvious tool inferfaces that Anthropic uses as training scenarios.by mips_avatar
- > The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on. And it makes each device discoverable in a standard format, so that devices and agents can find each other and communicate across networks without needing a bespoke “translator” program in between.
> the MHS driver then automatically produces a reference file with information about a device’s general characteristics, such as what it can measure, what can be adjusted, and what safety limits will be enforced
But that's just USB. USB HID does all of that.
Any USB device can declare that it offers sensors like "Biometric: Body Temperature" or "Environmental: Temperature" or "Environmental: Surface Temperature".
I guess USB HID is designed for human input devices while they are more concerned about what you might call "output devices". And putting it in a driver gives you flexibility with legacy hardware
by wongarsu - The standard makes sense: models work much better when devices expose standardized, machine-readable interfaces.
But as far as I can tell, this technical "standard" isn't actually public yet (you have to apply for access to even see or implement it.) Anthropic says they plan to open source it later.
Quite a departure from the way foundational hardware standards like USB and CAN were developed. You shouldn't need permission to read a standard.
by sinab - MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years.
They finally looked at how other protocols do things, and made something that behaves in recent versions. But it's hard as heck to take this company at all seriously. The don't really care about ecosystems (AGENTS.md), they don't seem to know think or care much about protocols until they have to (MCP's incredibly long redemption ark). The vibes are all off.
Maybe they avoid laying their own pitfalls this time. Maybe it's better. It'd be nice to start seeing some kind of cause to trust this company as vaguely capable computer-using people. But so far that hasn't been the case.