wowie zowie turns out setting up a secure home server is easier than i thought.

ANYWAY! see this cool video which i stole from the official website:

cargo install airshipper

i hope to see you mayhaps visiting Gwarlic sometime.

to change your password, visit here.

If you forgot your password, well... send me a dm. I can't verify that you own your username sooo... we will figure it out, okay?

EDIT: yesyes, the IP exposes my location, whatever, happy maria-finding everyone!

"Wowie look at my tool call format": this sucks and is getting me nowhere.

always on HF (huggingface), always pulling the latest llama-cpp to test, quantize and run the latest smol text predictors and image segmenters.

my brain is mush, my mood on the subject is low and my interest in scaffolding and harnessing is decreasing at a rapid pace.

real agents need real models: large ones. deepseek V4 flash, minimax M3, Kimi.

i dont want to pay for those, that defeats the "fun playing" part of it and makes me think of money (yes, I know its cheap, I'd be paying like 2€ a month, but still!)

if i make a godot agent, nobody cares about it, its "efficiency", how its animated, how easy and fun it is to set up and how fluid the text parsing and tool call previews are. there wont be a youtuber person saying "ooh thats smooth.... how are other agents so much worse?" about it.

only vibe-coding claude-suckling losers are gonna use it, complain about no free tier and leave.

the only one who cares is me, and i should spend that effort elsewhere and stop caring about this stupid hypie bs.

large-scale stuff is fun, whatever, but its out of my interest pool, so i dont care.

smol local models suck, which is where i live, so:
my experience sucks as much as the local models do.

why is it so difficult to distance myself from this stuff?
is it

• fear?
• actual interest?
• weird investment thoughts?
• the idea of making something good with it?
• the wish of local LMs to become viable? (yes it is)

its not like im profiting in any way, nobody cares about what i do and i also stop caring.

but what do i follow instead?

... watch.... gameplay videos? naw

... work on Bloom. yea fair. whatever I do, I should always be working on Bloom instead. (its a game about some butterfly character exploring a 3D mountain in the Austrian alps and-- collecting nectar from flowers and such. I still only have concept art.)

im sitting alone on the balcony, while peeps are celebrating in the hall and I dont want to celebrate with them.

they are partially celebrating our replacement.

this is the softest "overthrow the world" scenario ive heard of so far.

its not all overblown. its not all bs. its not all cash-grabby CEO sloppery. its not all useless chatbots in places you dont want them. its not all "optimize the human away" agendas. its not all just there to be there.

but oh boy 👦 it sure seems so from the outside.

i believe that language models in particular have actual good uses.
they can simplify computer navigation, help or come up with scientific / mathmatical breakthroughs and they can help with understanding subjects on a deeper level, without having to pay a personal tutor or have smart friends (which would obviously be preferred).
is that worth training on the entire internet? im not sure.
if chatgpt ++ pro max and claude opus mythos plus times 10 xhigh 3x speed were free to use and run locally, maybe we (or I at least) would think differently about this. because.... let's be real: ai is not "eating all of our water". most data centers use basic fans or closed-loop water cooling. just like any water-cooled PC at home does and the main environmental problems stem from the power consumption, which is an energy-source problem and less of an LM-specific problem.

if THIS was whats possible with local language models: that would be great!
no more man-in-the-middle company, no bad feels about continuous compute waste, no more feeling of being sold back all of digital humanities labour with no compensation.

but thats not where we are. these capabilities are behind 200€/month paywalls, proprietary models and... awfully excited CEOs selling their text predictors as the second coming of jesus Christ (our all lord and saviour), god (whos less interesting) and mosis (I think he can split oceans. pretty cool).

i need a permanent vacation from local language models.

if anyone reads this, give us your thoughts! or give them to me at least, if no one else is around, I will read them.

this was human-written in case anyone thought otherwise.

yes, thats right! i know that all yall ai-haters can't wait for me to stop posting about this absolutely overblown subject of tool-call parsers and

I ALSO CANT WAIT.

its not even that interesting.

ANYWAY!

u know what's sucks for LMs to generate?...

tool calls. they hate it.

But! u know what doest feel like a tool call but actually is one?

think about it.

its something u have likely already used plenty times yourself.

its! - - -

drumroll

The Slash Command!

wowie zowie how have i missed this one.

now oooobviously basic slash commands would only suffice for very basic calls like

/read path="file.txt" from=0 to=100

or

/use_skill name="scenes-and-nodes"

~(skills~ ~rule)~

but like - pffff this gets exhausting quick when writing larger stuff, like files!

/write path="file.txt" content="oh god\nit begins.\n\nthe never-ending c-escapes"

yea this sucks. No human would want to write this to do stuff.

lets spread out those args, and pull the idea from my last post (about multiline-strings as codeblocks)

/write
path="file.txt"
content=

now this! ~
feels writable.

I feel free in this code block.
and im sure qwen does too.

and best of all:

we are saving TWO TOLENS (!!!) compared to my last format per tool call:

[use_skill  
name="theme-creator"  
]

compared to:

/use_skill  
name="theme-creator"

do u see it? thats TWO (2!!!!) TOKENS freeing up infron of our eyes:

1. \n
2. ]

yes, we are saving two tokens per tool call.

looking at YOU, opencode, which puts 16k tokens JUST for the system prompt! >:(

why dies this work? wellll-

• slash commands are well-known, unlikey previous format
• multiline args appear to be a fitting addition (essentially replacing the with \n as a separator)
• code-block multiline-strings had to be included cuz- yea, those LMs loooove generating em and hate c-escapes. keep messing it up, even big LMs.

absolute insanity. here a sys prompt to make an LM work with the format

You are agent with tools
read(path:str,from:int,to:int)->file content between from-to lines
write(path:str, content:str)->confirmation
search(query:str, is_regex:bool=false, type:Array[str]=["file_content","file_path"])->results (type can include file_content,file_path,dir_path
...

To call, write slash command at end of msg:

/write
path="/home/maria/file.txt"
content=
` ` `
content
here
` ` `

values are json-style, multiline-strings always in code blocks.
can call multiple in one msg

thats enough for basic tool usage with todays models. yes, even with 4B ones.

487 characters long, tokenizes to 118 tokens (when converting the triple ` strings to actual code blocks).

it works! makes the LM generate the calls correctly, even with banter as a prefix.... to keep itself on-course.

horray we solved climate change /s

oh well, time to actually implement this stuff tho....

its not difficult, but when ya want stable partial-tool-call-parsing, its a bit annoying.

UPDATE: wowie writing string parsers is difficult.

im so sleepy.

agents driven by language models (LMs) call functions to do stuff. Functions like these:

• read_file(path, from, to)
• write(path, content)
• list_fir(path, show_hidden = false)
• edit_file(path, old_string, new_string)

this is not a simplification btw.

so far, LMs were told to generate any of these formats to call a function:

• json, which sucks cuz of c-escape
• xml which sucks cuz of closing tags
• yaml which sucks cuz of multilinear strings being indented (sucks for LMs)
• just bash which sucks cuz of security

wow these all have problems with something, hm?

worst of all: we wanna save tokens wherever possible. so if an LM has to generate a full </parameter> for each argument in a function, that adds up quick

Introducing: my new format

wowie let's have a look at this format!

[write path="file.txt" content=

content of file here
horray newlines
no c escape! cool, i can regex all I want [\s\S]*

]

now isnt that simple?

• no string escape problems
• no xml-closing tags
• no json-brace-foolery
• no... | symbols for multilinear strings

now, of course, this is a new format. so language models suck at generating it, right?

WRONG

even a local 2-bit quant of qwen 3.6 35B-A3B aligned to it super easily.

and! even a dense Qwen3 4B model at Q4 quant worked with it flawlessly. I'm tired and need to sleep.

now congratulate me! say "horray wow ur such a genius ohmygod we are gonna save so many tokens and thus möney".

go, go head. im not gonna ask an LM to do it, that much is clear.

or, even better: tell me what SUCKS about this, im always open for critical feedback.

id rather be wrong than believe im right all the time.

look at her. but! but, more importantly: look at her dress.

wowie. zowie. like - gosh - dressies which have a kind of bib part in the front just - like - they feel and look so safe and comforting....

just like - like - really tho, look how safe krita girl looks right here.

turns out she has a name!!!! "Kiki the Cyber-Squirrel" wow! what a very cutie name <3 very mmuch huge fan of Kiki now.

just... i cant get enough of it. whenever theres a - a square-type bib on a dress or on essentially any clothing i get super super excited and point and go "THERE!!! dressie!"

anyway-

how are you doing today? ~

alternative image link (blahaj zone)

---

brainmade in case people are wondering

Features!

We like em, but hate waiting for them.

Features are the difference between a thing and a thing u use.

Kimi has office support, but cant work with libreoffice files!

---

Qwen supports markdown uploads, but doesn't support my specific plaintext file-type!

---

GLM has a cool slides-creator, but cant work with spreadsheets or zip archives!

All these are missing features.
Features where a dev from the company has to go in and implement it.

This sucks.

• Asking for a feature sucks.
• Waiting for features to be implemented sucks.
• Not getting a feature sucks.

What's the solution? We would have to become employees at the company itself...

Reintroducing: Agent Skills

Fine, let's do it ourselves then.

Let's equip our agent with a read_file, edit_file list_dir and bash tool... And a present_files tool, so the agent can send us files back.

And now let's give it some skills!

• /home/qwen/
  • skills/
    • ms_office/
    • libreoffice/
    • godot/
    • zip/
    • pdf/

Each one has a SKILL.md and also some scripts the agent can use to work with foreign files.

• The user sends a zip directory? Okay, let's use the skill.
• use_skill(name = "zip")

[...]
## Decompressing

To extract a zip archives content, use unzip command like this:
[...]

• oh, that was easy. well then lets unzip that archive and see what the user sent me
• bash(command = "unzip /home/qwen/Downloads/upload.zip /home/qwen/upload/")
• list_dir(path = "/home/qwen/upload")

Contents of ~/uploads/
Portfolio.pdf
Portfolio.odt
thoughts.md

• Aha! let's use the pdf skill to view this pdf
• use_skill(name = "pdf")
• [...]

Aaaaah yes, working with all kinds of files, in all kinds of workflows, exactly the way you (and not the company) wants.

An agent that grows with you, and works better with you each time you add or edit a skill.

• Qwen keeps messing up godot scene formats?
  • Add a godot skill containing basics of scene structure and scripts to check its work before sending to you
• Kimi still hasn't added libreoffice support?
  • Well guess what. Add a libreoffice skill and let Kimi use the scripts to edit the document!
• ChatGPT somehow hasn't cought up with the slide-creation hype?
  • Add a slideshow skill to make your wildest cooperate slop dreams come true!

No need to wait for features anymore, when you can just add it yourself.

(this post has been entirely human-generated)

didn't know "pancake mixes" are a thing until i met a certain someone online <3

alternative image link (blahaj zone)

in germany, "pancakes" are usually very flat, almost becoming crepes. i like em ~ u roll em up and eat em ~ ~ ~

apparently, american pancakes* are thick. like - 3 centimeters thick. u can't roll those! wowie zowie.

i put brainmade tag instead of my previous no ai cuz.... eh - i felt like it.
"no ai" implies "free of slop" meanwhile "brainmade" implies "a human thought about and made this".... which feels nicer to say to me. also it fits that thing this no boilerplate guy made so horray iguess----

also, this song found in the latest 8th episode of the amazing digital circus was very nice. i pirated it and luv it ~ ~ ~ ~

it makes me think and i like thinking.

also!!!! im lookin for - im lookin for peeps to play some gems with----

so like

if u got like umm - a switch 2 or switch 1 (with some games) then like - um-- maybe put a comment if u wanna--- dunno

EDIT: removed duplicate "rule" in title

i - i - shivers i might not be able to help myself does weird arm movements i-iii ii ---- i might need this, i might need it for myself yesyes, its such a - its such a fun and intellectually stimulating project to work on and andand it would be my first "real project i could show" andandand it would totally be worth the hate on lemmy and ---- and i gotta do sooomething riiiight so i better do something that is fun--- and video games feel like more of a chore and watching yt feels even worse sooo this is totally valid yesyes im not evil and also this is not consumerism so its good clearly and also this is good

it would - it would - it would be the perfect portfolio piece, wouldn't it beeee? yesssss- that is it. that must be it- my saving grace- my magnum opus- the one thing i can point to and say "i made a full thing and it works and is better than most" yesssss-----

surely this will clear my head of those foul thoughts and let me focus on what i truly care about afterwards, certainly infact!

blahaj zone image link

what thoughts put you at ease?

for me, its imagining either sitting in a nice looking garden all alone and drinking tea ~

i told myself that i would post today, and so -- here we go. have a butterfly charmer

the butterfly charmer is the blue-ish character! they charm

which is super duper very much cutie andand ~i~ ~wanna~ ~hug~ ~and~ ~kiss~ ~them~ ~(after~ ~getting~ ~consent~ ~of~ ~course)~ ~and~ ~have~ ~a~ ~date-~ ~like~ ~shown~ ~in~ ~the~ ~drawing~

so like yeah-- daylight prairie is such - like - .... mygosh... its heaven. here the song that plays in this area
they know. they know what they have created here. mygosh. wow. wowie zowie

i will try to post more in the coming days <3

*the image of cat and the green > symbols were there before I edited the image

I was feelin lazy, so here we go, have a post-

should probably post more, i feel good doin things.

anyway--- i hope u are doing well! <3

wow! agents sure can do stuff.

Agent Basics

so like - claude code is getting a lot of attention lately. its some coding agent thing using their models.

lemmy just define what an agent is real quick:

agents dont just yap but they actually cook, as in: they can do stuff.
this works by having a secret back and fourth with the computer, its essentially doing function calls, but we call them "tool calls" because... why not.

Agents scaling Problem

this agentic loop works pretty well. but it doesn't scale well to hundreds - or even thousands of tools.

agents must be fed with tool-definitions, which have:

• name
• description
• arguments (usually with descriptions and types)
• example tool uses (optional)

for each individual tool.

now, all this stuff stuffs the LMs context, resulting in

• higher costs (because of more input tokens)
• it just confuses the model. could you remember hundreds of functions all at once?... i couldn't.

aaaaa How do we solve this?

introducing!!!!!!!!!!!!

docs!!! but for language models.

yes! that's what anthropic is trying to propose with SKILL.md. here's what that looks like:

• u just give the agent a filesystem with some docs and some useful files.
• a "skill" is just a directory with a SKILL.md file in it. that file must include a yaml header with name and description
• every single SKILL.md file header in the filesystem is automatically loaded into the agents context along with the files location and an instruction "Read any skill file if it appears useful" or something similar

your filesystem may look like this

• /
  • skills/
    • stock_prices/
      • SKILL.md
      • stock_stools.py
      • report_format.md
    • stack_overflow/
      • SKILL.md
      • stack_overflow_tools.py
    • creative_writing/
      • SKILL.md
      • themes.md
      • preferred_format.md

the /skills/stock_prices/SKILL.md may look like this:

***
name: stock_prices
description: Useful for detailed stock analysis
***
## Getting stock Prices
Use ./stock_prices_tools.py to run code which gets you the stock prices of registered companies:

` ` `python
import "/skills/stock_prices/stock_tools.py" as stonks
stocks_for_a_year = stonks.get_prices(company="nvidia", from="01-01-2001", to="01-01-2020", increment="1 month")

stocks_today = stonks.get_price(company="nvidia")

print("Stock prices from 2001 til 2020:\n" + str(stocks_for_a_year) + "\n\ntodays price: " + str(stocks_today))
` ` `
no need to read the file itself.

## Creating reports
Read ./report_format.md for the users preferred structure of a stock prices report

[...]

so... we simply decentralize the knowledge and the tools, by just putting them into files, so that things can be read once they become useful.

but Isn't this super unsafe?

this approach assumes that the given agent can write and run python code.

this works great for such agents... but well... its also rather unsafe, isn't it?

so you would have to

• either trust the agent with whatever it's doin (like editing and removing files and such)
• or supervise its every step

both options are bad. so! let's build our own better solution

Let's make this better

how about this? we add a .tools/ dir into every skill dir. and each file in that .tools/ dir will be a safe python file, which defines a single tool, like this:

• /
  • skills/
    • stock_prices/
      • SKILL.md
      • report_format.md
      • .tools/
        • get_prices.py
        • get_price.py
        • [...]

then, once a SKILL.md file is read, all the tools in its .tools/ dir are loaded into the agents memory, so it kinda explores to find new tools.

So what does this look like in practice?

this SKILL.md setup gives us:

• essentially infinite tools
• dynamic context retrieval (only reads stuff when necessary)
• usually lower token prices
• the ability to define standard operating procedures without forcing it into the agents memory

so like - gimme an example

okay okay, heres an example of what this might look like, without anything hidden. again, each quote is a "user" message and each bullet point is an "assistant" message:

You are an agent and you have access to these tools:

• read(path: str) # returns file content or dir content
• create_file(path: str, content: str)
  You can use tools using this format:
  name_of_the_tool(arg1=your value here, ag2=another value here, ...) Simply include that format at the end of your message to use it.

Skills

Read these skill files when they become useful:

• /skills/stock_prices/SKILL.md (Useful for detailed stock analysis)
• /skills/stack_overflow/SKILL.md (Read this to search for help on programming problems)
• /skills/creative_writing/SKILL.md (For writing stories, poems and whatever creative task the user feels you should perform) Today is 16-01-2026 hey, plz put the stock prices of fairphone over last 2 years in some txt plzplz <3 also gimme a kiss when ur done >////<

• Sure! I will read the stocks skill
  read(path="/skills/stock_prices/SKILL.md")

content of /skills/stock_prices/SKILL.md

blablabla here the entire content of that file

two tools have been added:

• get_stock_prices(company: str, from: str, to: str, increment: str) # retrieves stock prices over time. "from" and "to" must have this format "DD-MM-YYYY" and increment can be one of "day", "week" "month", "year" with optional number prefix like "3 week"
• get_stock_price(company: str) # returns current stock price of given company

• Right, I will look at the report format.
  read("/skills/stock_prices/report_format.md")

content of /skills/stock_prices/report_format.md

some format stuff here, eh - whatever

• okay, now lemmy see those stock prices!
  get_stock_prices(company="fairphone", start="01-01-2024", end="01-01-2026", increment="month")

<tool_response>
blablabla some stock prices here...
</tool_response>

• (the rest of this continues like the initial example i gave)

now, the important thing to note here is that we didn't include the context of all those other skills. here, the agent doesn't need to know about creative writing or whatever - just about stocks stuff.

we essentially lead the agent around the filesystem, by prompting it in the files to look at other files if they appear useful.

this - is - huge!

the tool amount was rather limited previously, and - best of all: it doesn't even have to be about tools! it can be SOPs, style directions, or just some info about yourself which doesn't need to be loaded all the time.

butbutbut!!! *even bester-of-all!?!!?!

You can share Skills online!

now this - THIS!!! changes things.

sure, being able to make a skill to solve some edge case is cool. BUT!

now you can go share your skill online, and nobody has to deal with that edge case anymore.

this way, you slowly accumulate more skills, improving your agent with more and more capabilities.

But what if I have too many Skills?

oh no! the same problem from earlier came back! aaaaaaaa >o<

worry not ~ for there is a super simple solution:

just move some folders and edit some files.

yes, just cluster some skills together! maybe put stock_prices along with web_search into a new skill online_stuff with a description "For searching the web and getting stock prices". then rename those old SKILL.md files to something else... like maybe general.md or whatever and remove their header.

Verdict iguess

this stuff is cool.
i always liked the idea of structuring stuff as files and dirs instead of json or whatever sql uses. it makes editing the data SO much quicker and easier for everyone.

if u wanted to edit an agents behaviour earlier, you would have to

• know prompting stuff
• know programming basics
• go and find the files somewhere in your agents directory
• hope that they expose their tools
• somewhere in there, adjust a system prompt

but now! u can just - add a directory with stuff in it you want the agent to have.

its - so simple and obvious - but soooooooooooooooo useful.

i feel the urge to.... write some random skill and see the agent explore the dir and say "ah, this seems useful" and get all giddy bout it ----- but that's probably just me....

* the background was taken from the Sky: Children of the Light Wiki

alt image link from blahaj zone

so anyway - I didnt post in quite a long while, so here I go yappin bout that one game i keep playin. there really is no reason to do good besides the good feels, and som peeps seem to not have that very much -..... so here we r.

imagine how fun and cool the world were if there would be a reason to play along nicely - like -... gosh, now that sounds pretty nice, hm? a world where slip-ups r oki - but bein systematically evil.,.. well - its actually bad for that peep.

but no! now instead, im considering stealing from supermarkets for my own benefit because there really is nothing holding me back from doing that. like - I dun wana! but if that somehow hurts the larger chain, im all here for it-.... iguess it doesnt hurt the larger chain so i should leave it,... but in larger - clearly profitable markets it feels fine-

feels so wrong.... or rather -.... doesnt feel so wrong anymore when u notice that all the big peeps r also bein evil. if that means that all the cool and nice peeps stay at the bottom which the cheaters and not-cool evils peeps get to rise, well like - that feels like the opposite of karma (or whatever that is called-)! theres clearly an inverted reward system happening here!

piracy and the like doesnt feel evil if the prices for watching the art legally is rising so sharply, but not to offer a better service, but to just.... make more möni.