I’ve been playing with this stack and left wondering if Strands provides any secret sauce with Agent Core. So far it doesn’t feel that way and sometimes they even feel at odds with each other.
I think strands and agentcore don’t have a ton of overlap but I have found agentcore makes running strands frameworks pretty easy and relatively inexpensive. I like strands in that it’s the most mature (IMO) that isn’t specific to a model provider - although I found using things like vertex to require a lot of custom work to get caching and other things to work properly, the maturity is all on bedrock.
I’ll need to dig into burr - I’m not finding strands has an insurmountable maturity to it but it’s not carrying a lot of weird opinion (like some of the other OSS frameworks seem to be highly infected with) and is pretty practical in what it exposed and does, and is most like the agentic frameworks I’ve worked with inside FAANG. If burr can meet that and keep growing I’d probably look at moving to it as I also get a sense strands has a bit of the Amazon “highly probable to be abandoned once the managers and PMs get promoted” feeling.
I still can’t use Containers because of a broken DNS implementation. I suppose I could manually set the DNS as I switch on and off VPN, but I don’t have to with Finch, Podman, or Docker Desktop.
I live in the SE US suburbs and a regular story on the news are fears over roaming packs of kids on e-bikes or e-motorcycles. Now, while the safety concerns of reckless riding are warranted, it also tells me that at least some of the kids are alright.
I live in a low density, large neighborhood where kids 8-17 are out roaming all the time, the older half heading to adjacent shops and other neighborhoods. I recognize and know who most are and their parents. The common trend I see is a purposeful limiting of screen time.
We have the same "problem" where I live in central coast CA. It's so rad to see kids ripping e-bikes all over town. Would I prefer the kid riding on the back seat isn't staring at her phone? Of course! But at least they are outside exploring! Fwiw most of the kids I see with this freedom are Mexican but that could be because I live closer to and work downtown, closer to lower income areas and not in the suburbs.
I've been trying out MCP servers for FreeCAD to mixed results.
One area I had near magic was providing a land survey which includes details in writing of the plat. It took those directions and beautifully reconstructed the boundaries to exact precision in CAD.
Where I ran into trouble was creating good constraints on sketches without being overly explicit. I kept running into it creating distance constraints from an arbitrary point instead of using other elements in the diagram that a human drafter would think to do by default.
I've done this exact approach before. It's a good way to exfiltrate data. Post the software on GitHub pages, or a popular CDN that co-hosts other shared libraries and you've got a very difficult to block method.
Really goes to show that it's very difficult to stop a motivated and informed actor.
I'm likely being overly specific, but blocking npm downloads, installation on corporate devices, etc is trivial in a restrictive corporate environment.
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