alt Hacker NewsI actually though about this issue, but while Pi can have this script-like environment thanks to the fact that it's based on an interpreted language (TypeScript), Rust has its own limitation as a compiled language.
I decided to allow for customization in a different way:
1. The prompt library (~/.config/hypernova/prompts/) acts as a simpler alternative to Skills, with the built-in prompts that should replace superpowers + Claude's frontend-design
2. Compile-time features; things that might make the agent more bloated can be disabled when you decide to compile zerostack
3. Clean code; code that's short and easy to read, you can just throw zerostack on its own source code in order to build a custom fork if your necessity can't be satisfied. Good features could also be adopted by the main version.
4. Permission mode; as you can see in the README, there was lots of concern around the permission model, and I landed on a 4-mode system that goes from "Restrictive" (no commands) to "YOLO" (whatever the agent wants to do" + custom regex patterns for allow/ask/deny permission on 'bash' calls. In your case, you just need to run `zerostack -R` to force all tools to ask for permission.
(Also, there is a work-in-progress features for programmable agents, but that's yet to be announced)
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I've been trying to use `Deno` underneath `Rust` so that the tools can still be written in Typescript and thus self-mutated without the compilation step (but I can still try to do clever things with V8 Isolates or similar). It's been an ugly experiment so far; I'm vaguely thinking a simpler model would be to just define a binary "API" and run tools by exec-ing binaries.
> simpler alternative to Skills
this concerns me. Skills are already just about the simplest possible thing; they're just prompts, in a directory!
Ok, what about having tools be discoverable from the environment, similar to how $PATH works in POSIX?
There could be an env var $AGENT_TOOLS, a string of paths delimited by `:` and tools would be discovered as some specific format of file. Maybe a JSON that contains tool name, list of parameters and the command to run it.
This is essentially decoupling tools from the agent, allowing more customization and per-project environments. It does require shipping and installing more binaries, one for each tool probably.