YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Google's Open Agentic Orchestrator

94 points blazarquasar 1 hour ago 33 comments

jmathai 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not sure why, exactly. But I don't pay any attention to news like this from Google. I don't know if there's some marketing which has me writing them off or if it's something else.

What I do know is that the Gemini integration into sheets is surprisingly incapable of performing basic tasks. This is where I expect Google to really shine. I expected Sheets + Gemini to be magical like Google Photos was. I hardly try anymore besides some basic math questions when I don't feel like inputting the formula myself.

The other thing I know is Google's propensity to sunset products. For many things, it's not a huge deal. And it may not be for this. But, why? When there are alternatives - both open and closed.

solidasparagus 1 hour ago | parent

This is an Apache 2.0 open source project

Melonai 21 minutes ago | parent

On your Sheets + Gemini integration point, I've genuinely tried to give the Gemini integration into Google Docs & Google Sheets a chance. It is so incompetent that it is fully useless to me. I have not gotten a single correct solution each time I tried to use it, even something I consider table stakes. I often write my work reports in Vim in Markdown format, but they need to go to the corporate Google space. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many prompts I have, it was completely unable to manage the command to "convert the Markdown format markers into native Google Docs markers". And I want to note, this was 2 pages of extremely simple Markdown with no "advanced" patterns, like tables or quotes, I think all I used was heading-marks, bolding, italicizing, and code blocks. This is something I would expect even GPT 3.5 to succeed in, and even more so Luna, but somehow it destroyed the formatting throughout half the document. This leads me to believe that they apply the absolute cheapest model they have there, or they have the model a harness which can barely be considered working. I found it absurd when I found out that they suddenly made this Gemini integration an additional paid plan recently, there's absolutely no way I can consider that in good faith.

Mizza 1 hour ago | parent

k8sification of AI was always inevitable, if only as a form of salary justification.

eleventen 1 hour ago | parent

Ah yes, k8s8n.

__MatrixMan__ 29 minutes ago | parent

You know you're on the right path when Kate Satan turns up.

TomGarden 1 hour ago | parent

Question: What is Google's track record for where their open source releases end up over time?

Genuinely not knowledgeable here

AlexErrant 51 minutes ago | parent

Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

joemazerino 37 minutes ago | parent

Maintain it briefly then slowly let it die.

hustwindmaple 20 minutes ago | parent

more like create a big launch for promo, then maintain it briefly then slowly let it die

jandrese 4 minutes ago | parent

That's not fair. Sometimes they kill it off quickly.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

blazarquasar 8 minutes ago | parent

It depends on where they decide to go with it, I guess. Kubernetes, Go, Tensorflow, Chromium, gRPC are some examples that obviously went incredibly well.

pianopatrick 1 hour ago | parent

I can understand why it was chosen, but I'm not a fan of writing a bunch of yaml.

beeman 26 minutes ago | parent

I assume they expect agents will be writing most of those

jauntywundrkind 56 minutes ago | parent

I'd evaluated both Google's Agent Substrate (that underlies Ax) and their Scion project. I really enjoy how Scion operates with existing tools really well. Ax/Agent Substrate is much more a greenfield independent effort, it's own thing.

I think Scion has so much more mature a disosition: you could write OpenCode plugins that enhance the runner, and use that locally, and use it in Scion. With Ax/Agent Substrate, you are opting in to a pretty huge stack that is just Agent Substrate, that is their runners, their harness, their substrate. I do think their actor model is pretty neat! It's neat having the agent have such primacy! But it feels so much less integrative, is such it's own thing. Scion, to me, is much more interesting an effort, that similarly helps scale out agentic workloads.

https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion

solarkraft 30 minutes ago | parent

> you are opting in to a pretty huge stack that is just Agent Substrate, that is their runners, their harness, their substrate

The website makes me think the contrary: It is described as “low opinion” and explicitly mentions that the running tasks don’t even have to be AI agents. Can you explain in what ways you’re more locked in than the website suggests?

Scion at the same time talks much more about concrete agents, giving me the opposite initial impression.

pama 21 minutes ago | parent

Not GP, but you start with Kubernetes…

> You need a Kubernetes cluster, ko (brew install ko), a container registry your cluster can pull from, and a reachable Agent Substrate Control API (in-cluster default: api.ate-system.svc.cluster.local:443).

> make deploy AX_IMAGE_REPO=<your-registry>

> This deploys Redis, then builds and deploys the control plane images with ko. Everything lands in the ax-system namespace.

Mond_ 50 minutes ago | parent

The reality with releases like this is that I'm 90% sure most Google bigwigs have never heard of it, and it's misleading to label it as "Google's" in the title.

Yes, it was developed by Google employees, that does not imply it has the full backing of Google, or Deepmind, or GCP. Notably, the website doesn't seem to claim this either.

foota 31 minutes ago | parent

This /looks/ at least more official. Most unofficial Google projects have a disclaimer in the repo.

Stagnant 29 minutes ago | parent

It is on Google's github https://github.com/google/ax and the title comes from there.

varun_ch 29 minutes ago | parent

the repo description https://github.com/google/ax is "Google's open agentic orchestrator"

mynegation 11 minutes ago | parent

I have no insider knowledge but https://x.com/rakyll is working on it and she is tweeting about it and I got the impression there is a quite a team behind it. It looks like an effort in GCP.

skapadia 39 minutes ago | parent

Everyone and their mother are vibe coding their own solutions like this, all the time.

lopatin 28 minutes ago | parent

This is bound to cause some confusion with the other tool called Ax for agentic development: https://axllm.dev/ (which is DSPy for other languages)

motoboi 23 minutes ago | parent

this is nice, basically virtual threads for kubernetes.

mentalgear 19 minutes ago | parent

I don't see a meaningful difference to the 100s of other 'agentic frameworks' that promise to be the one to all solution for all your troubles.

Would be about time we get benchmarks for these ... so these can also be gamified just like with the LLMs.

quadrature 5 minutes ago | parent

what are your points of comparison ?

DanMcInerney 18 minutes ago | parent

I really don't think any of these SOTA labs are doing agentic engineering correctly. Skills are the universal language of all agent harnesses. If you abstract the taste and prescription out of the skills and into guidance docs, then leave the skills as basically just workflow scaffolding, you can build task-specific workflows that work with any harness like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, etc. Technically, you only really need 2 skills, work and review, and with these you can build infinitely complex workflows including self-improving loops. I built this out and have been using it for months. It's been extremely nice. https://github.com/DanMcInerney/orchflows

handfuloflight 3 minutes ago | parent

How does your criticism relate to the specific of OP posted? https://github.com/google/ax/blob/main/docs/concepts.md#work... This says it has skill registries.

guluarte 15 minutes ago | parent

I just have a tmux session acting as the orchestrator, and I tell it to report back and direct the other agents working in separate tmux sessions.

kundi 13 minutes ago | parent

Why kubernetes? Seems like an overload

chrismarlow9 3 minutes ago | parent

Future of platforms is operators in k8s to abstract the developer need to the underlying systems. On local it maps to kvm, on gke it maps to their stuff, on AWS to RDS. It's "interfaces" on a platform level so devs can just ask for a thing.

Overall I agree though, this is a bit of an abuse of that concept.

mcoliver 2 minutes ago | parent

I have been happy with Google's Antigravity harness and Jules so looking forward to playing with this. Thanks for sharing. Simultaneously I am looking to also revisit local offline models.

While I feel like I have a decent understanding of the model landscape I'm feeling a bit lost at which agentic harness to leverage for local models. Hermes, Cline, Aider, Qwen Code, Goose, Pi, OpenCode, something else? Can I modify the antigravity settings/program to point to a local model? Where should I spend my energy?