Make software and documentation easier for agents to use

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 33:31

   I had to follow all these instructions. This was crazy. So I think the last part of my talk, therefore, focuses on, can we just build for agents? I don't want to do this work. Can agents do this, thank you. Okay. So roughly speaking, I think there's a new category of consumer and manipulator of digital information. It used to be just humans through GUIs, or computers through APIs, and now we have a completely new thing, and agents, they're computers, but they are human-like, kind of, right?

2. 34:03

   They're people spirits. There's people spirits on the internet and they need to interact with their software infrastructure. Can we build for them? It's a new thing. So as an example, you can have robots.txt on your domain, and you can instruct or advise, I suppose, web crawlers on how to behave on your website. In the same way, you can have maybe lms.txt file, which is just a simple markdown, that's telling LLMs what this domain is about.

3. 34:26

   And this is very readable to an LLM. If it had to instead get the HTML of your webpage and try to parse it, this is very error prone and difficult and we'll screw it up and it's not gonna work. So we can just directly speak to the LLM, it's worth it. A huge amount of documentation is currently written for people. So you will see things like lists and bold and pictures, and this is not directly accessible by an LLM.

4. 34:49

   So I see some of the services now are transitioning a lot of their docs to be specifically for LLMs. So Vercel and Stripe, as an example, are early movers here, but there are a few more that I've seen already. And they offer their documentation in Markdown. Markdown is super easy for LLMs to understand. This is great. Maybe one simple example from my experience as well. Maybe some of you know 3Blue1Brown.

5. 35:15

   He makes beautiful animation videos on YouTube. Yeah, I love this library, so that he wrote Manon, and I wanted to make my own, and there's extensive documentations on how to use Manon, and so I didn't want to actually read through it, so I copy pasted the whole thing to an LLM, and I described what I wanted, and it just worked out of the box, like LLM just bi-coded me in animation exactly what I wanted, and I was like, wow, this is amazing, so if we can make docs legible to LLMs, it's going to unlock a huge amount of views, and I think this is wonderful and should happen more.

6. 35:54

   The other thing I wanted to point out is that you do unfortunately have to, it's not just about taking your docs and making them appear in Markdown? That's the easy part. We actually have to change the docs because any time your docs say click, this is bad. An LLM will not be able to natively take this action right now. So Bursell, for example, is replacing every occurrence of click with the equivalent curl command that your LLM agent could take on your behalf.

7. 36:17

   And so I think this is very interesting. And then of course there's a model context protocol from Anthropic and this is also another way, it's a protocol of speaking directly to agents as this new consumer and manipulator of digital information. So I'm very bullish on these ideas The other thing I really like is a number of little tools here and there that are helping ingest data In like very LLM friendly formats. So for example when I go to a github repo like my nano GPT repo I can't feed this to an LLM and ask questions about it because it's you know This is a human interface on github So when you just change the URL from github to git ingest Then this will actually concatenate all the files into a single giant text and it will create a directory structure etc and this is ready to be copy-pasted into your favorite LLM,

8. 36:59

   and you can do stuff. Maybe even more dramatic example of this is DeepWiki, where it's not just the raw content of these files, this is from Devon, but also they have Devon basically do analysis of the GitHub repo, and Devon basically builds up a whole docs pages just for your repo, and you can imagine that this is even more helpful to copy-paste into your LLM. So I love all the little tools that basically where you just change the URL, and it makes something accessible to an LLM.

9. 37:26

   So this is all well and great, and I think there should be a lot more of it. One more note I wanted to make is that it is absolutely possible that in the future, LLMs will be able to, it's not even future, this is today. They'll be able to go around and they'll be able to click stuff and so on. But I still think it's very worth basically meeting LLMs halfway, and making it easier for them to access all this information.

10. 37:50

    Because this is still fairly expensive, I would say, to use. and a lot more difficult. And so I do think that lots of software, there will be a long tail where it won't adapt because these are not like live player sort of repositories or digital infrastructure, and we will need these tools. But I think for everyone else, I think it's very worth kind of like meeting in some middle point. So I'm bullish on both, if that makes sense.

11. 38:14

    So in summary, what an amazing time to get into the industry. We need to rewrite a ton of code.