Show HN: Druids – Build your own software factory

(github.com)

64 points | by etherio 4 days ago ago

15 comments

  • jessmartin 3 days ago ago

    I love the idea of using a shared event log for coordination. Smart!

    I have a Symphony-style[1] factory, which keeps all the context in a single session, but I want to start splitting into stations with separate sessions, and I hadn’t worked out how to do communication between sessions.

    [1] https://github.com/openai/symphony

    • ElFitz 3 days ago ago

      Personally, I’ve had "maintenance" and "auditing" sessions successfully drop notes in a my loop’s "inbox" directory (even though it was intended for my use).

      I’d say that works as a simple initial approach. Second step is clarifying the "return address" and protocol, but what’s nice is that the message can actually contain those, meaning the protocol itself can evolve seamlessly over time.

      Which can also cause drift, though :/

  • zambelli 20 hours ago ago

    Can you expand on your approach of defining things around state transitions? Are you thinking of it as the state of a task (built, validated, integrated, etc)? Or something else entirely? I'm not sure I followed that part and it seemed rather key.

  • eitanlebras a day ago ago

    The multi-agent coordination problem is real. i've been running claude code solo all week and even that gets messy. Spinning up 5 agents that actually talk to each other cleanly sounds hard to get right. Curious how the environment isolation holds up at scale?

  • ethros 4 days ago ago

    I'm going to check this out. I’ve been working on my end-to-end development method and these types of holistic pipelines I think are the future. (or the present!)

    I've decided to start with concept capture, which then builds out strategy docs, which feed into specs, etc ... might be time for me to share, but I'm in the process of battle testing myself!

    Looking at your post again, I guess I could script a concepting agent to help hone the idea?

  • sensarts 3 days ago ago

    When you have 5 workers + a judge all running in isolated VMs, what is a workflow for tracing a failure? Can I replay the event log locally, or inspect what each agent tried? And also, can agents share intermediate logs, results without going through the event system?

    • etherio 3 days ago ago

      yes, you can read the logs, and see full actions, the agents can send messages to each other, and I am also about to make it possible for them to optionally read each other's traces

  • ipnon 3 days ago ago

    Interesting. I like it. Now let's say I currently use the OS process as my primitive for agents, just spawning `claude "foo bar baz"`, and orchestrating this way, using perhaps Unix style of files for intermediate data and piping for transformations. What would you are some good use cases of Druid for someone like me?

    • etherio 3 days ago ago

      What do you do with those agents? It's useful if you want to iterate on a flow and have more control over the orchestration/environment

  • brennan_maker 3 days ago ago

    > - building custom automated software pipelines for eg code review, pentesting, large-scale migrations, etc...

    I'd be interested in hearing more about how you did this, sounds super valuable

    • etherio 3 days ago ago

      Yeah, I guess we have sandboxes qwith our various code environemnts, and then we've been developing programs that run agents to do various things, which we iterated on to make them better at the task.

      For example, one spawns copies of the env with a PR and runs agents in the dev env to verify by running and demonstrating functionality and then comments on github

      another one is just a generic software factory that spawns a bunch of agents to coordinate on some repo, others do a redteaming flow, etc...

  • gavmor 3 days ago ago

    Seems like a powerful concept, and I'm excited to try it, but yikes does the code snippet seem like a textbook example of primitive obsession.

  • einarvollset 3 days ago ago

    Very cool!

  • a960206 3 days ago ago

    really cool,learned a lot from your project

  • abhinaystha 2 days ago ago

    Great idea