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  • Hacker News
  • I’m still figuring out codemode. I was using it in a prototype, but ended up stripping it out again, after realizing my small local LLM was using more tokens than usual. It was combining tool calls elegantly in code exactly how I hoped it would. The problem was that when any of those embedded tool calls failed (e.g. on parameter validation) the parent code execution tool call also failed. In response, the LLM kept rewriting large parts of the original code block.

    Btw, Monty by the pydantic team is a joy to work with if you need a way to securely run unverified code. It’s a simplified Python dialect. You can also use it from JS, iirc.

    by lemontheme
  • Can someone please tell me how to disable it permanently in pi? I have already disabled it in settings.json, but, it just doesn't get disabled:

        {
      "source": "npm:pi-mcp-adapter",
      "extensions": [
        "-index.ts",
        "-builtin:codemode"
      ]
    }
    and

        "autoEnableCodemode": false,
    by freakynit
  • I've noticed that code mode seems to cause progressive lobotomisation in Sol 6.1 around subagents. The more it uses it, the worse it gets at giving prompts to subagents:

      URLs, datasourceproxy accesspathonlyallowed anddefault404. Do not set authbasic onprivate ports; perplanPodmannetwork trustedinfrastructure nottenant boundary. Publicroutes internal /tinyauth protected internal, proxyGETemptybody /api/auth/nginx toprivate tinyauth3000; proxy_pass_request_headersoff, CookieonlyTinyauthSession header extracted map name/value actual runtime pattern tinyauth-session-[0-9a-f]{8}, X-Original-URL constructed
    This is unedited; it's merging words together and spamming keywords.
    by Starlevel004
  • The headline is "What is codemode". As someone who did not know what codemode is, I had to read until the section "Orchestrating The Harness", where it says "If you are not familiar with Codemode, it’s basically just a way to issue tool calls from within some language, in our case JavaScript."

    I could then somehow get what is meant from the examples, but the contents of the article do not at all match the headline.

    by planb
  • Sadly this seems like introducing a very complex apparatus for little gain. I don't need MCP or many tool calls that the agent can program around - in fact the promise of pi was that you basically just need bash and no other tools. The minimally-invasive approach would have been to just "inject" tool calls as virtual bash commands. No code mode required, no hands vs. brains dichotomy. LLM can use language of its own choosing to interact with tools.
    by dnlgrmm
  • I'm not sure why almost all codemode implementations choose Javascript. I prototyped an agent[1] to use bash as the language for codemode, which in my opinion worked equally well and requires no teaching (there is literally 0 prompt to teach the LLM about codemode. A tool named "bash" is enough to have them know the usage).

    [1] https://github.com/ylxdzsw/mu

    by ylxdzsw
  • If you're like me and you're still wondering what "codemode" is after reading the article and comments:

    It's giving the harness a small js sandbox to compose tool calls and manipulate the data they return before reading it into context.

    by ohgodhelpplease
  • Between this and the Cloudflare post, this is a lot of words and no simple system level picture. Here's what I think is going on:

    1. Homoiconicity: Harness mechanics are kludgy and we need proper homoiconicity to uniformly handle code (tool calls) and data ("natural language") as token streams.

    2. Actor semantics: for isolation, encapsulation and concurrency.

    3. Object capabilities: injected references and no ambient authority. Capabality-based reflection/introspection is a clean way to discover interfaces and affordances.

    "Code mode" or whatever is basically rediscovering this by hacking outward from LLM token streams, instead of from system design principles based on decades of computer science. It is the beginning of treating an LLM as a programming-language runtime participant (any takers for eval/apply?) rather than as a text/token generator with the harness as an ad-hoc interpreter.

    If existing implementations of code mode don't already support all this, I anticipate they will keep piling on hacks till they get to this point.

    ----

    I think it was Dan Ingalls who said "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.". I see the same for harnesses -- they're awkward middle children which fit neither in an LLM nor in the programming environment.

    Maybe the answer is to partner LLMs with Common Lisp or Scheme fibers / Spritely Goblins or Erlang BEAM and be done!

    by ssivark

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