tabletcorryYou should write an agent
It's interesting how much this makes you want to write Unix-style tools that do one thing and only one thing really well. Not just because it makes coding an agent simpler, but because it's much more secure!
One thing that radicalized me was building an agent that tested network connectivity for our fleet. Early on, in like 2021, I deployed a little mini-fleet of off-network DNS probes on, like, Vultr to check on our DNS routing, and actually devising metrics for them and making the data that stuff generated legible/operationalizable was annoying and error prone. But you can give basic Unix network tools --- ping, dig, traceroute --- to an agent and ask it for a clean, usable signal, and they'll do a reasonable job! They know all the flags and are generally better at interpreting tool output than I am.
I'm not saying that the agent would do a better job than a good "hardcoded" human telemetry system, and we don't use agents for this stuff right now. But I do know that getting an agent across the 90% threshold of utility for a problem like this is much, much easier than building the good telemetry system is.
> They know all the flags and are generally better at interpreting tool output than I am.
In the toy example, you explicitly restrict the agent to supply just a `host`, and hard-code the rest of the command. Is the idea that you'd instead give a `description` something like "invoke the UNIX `ping` command", and a parameter described as constituting all the arguments to `ping`?
Honestly, I didn't think very hard about how to make `ping` do something interesting here, and in serious code I'd give it all the `ping` options (and also run it in a Fly Machine or Sprite where I don't have to bother checking to make sure none of those options gives code exec). It's possible the post would have been better had I done that; it might have come up with an even better test.
I was telling a friend online that they should bang out an agent today, and the example I gave her was `ps`; like, I think if you gave a local agent every `ps` flag, it could tell you super interesting things about usage on your machine pretty quickly.
Or have the agent strace a process and describe what's going on as if you're a 5 year old (because I actually need that to understand strace output)