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It gets really fun when you prompt them to update their BOT.md, also they get access to previous run results so they continually "learn" from mistakes or investigate changes.

This is very cool, I just wonder where they get the crossing data!

I'm guessing from the AIS Vessel Tracking (mentioned in their data sources)- https://www.vesselfinder.com/realtime-ais-data

Thanks for sharing, I think it's kind of a different type of system although a lot of similarities for sure.

I made botctl explicitly to not have to talk to my agents, I wanted them running autonomously based on their BOT.md file's prompt / goals / skills.


I'll take a counterpoint, coding has historically not been cheap. Software engineers have been one of the highest paid professions for a long time. Personally while working a full time job, raising a family and trying to have some semblance of a social life my open source contributions fell off a cliff until recently with the popularization of coding agents. I've created more projects and software in the last 12 months than the past 10 years combined. Not to say a lot of it wasn't total slop or provided little utility, but it's been a fun and exciting time.

Another interesting point is that until recently most average people thought "code" was out of reach or they didn't have time / energy to learn it. My mother made a webapp with the help of claude code the other day to generate books, which she thought of and completed in the course of 3 days all the while learning about terminals, localhost, ports, APIs and more.


I think there's also something about being able to make it exactly how you want. For example I didn't like openclaw, I felt it was extremely over-engineered and I honestly couldn't even get it running on my first attempt. So I made botctl to be a generalized version where it doesn't rely on complex setup and have every bell and whistle, you just install it, create a directory with a BOT.md file and off it goes.

Here's two popular open-source projects that have combined 200k+ stars and 1,300+ contributors, with slightly different goals:

- https://github.com/anomalyco/opencodeagents

- https://github.com/OpenHands/OpenHands


Thanks for the feedback, I'll do that! I think different screens and system settings affect this a lot, on all the devices I've looked at the site on I felt it was quite comfortable to read, not to discount your experience, I'll keep that in mind for the future as well.

So I'm the creator of botctl which I created to satisfy my personal need for running many agents on a cron style loop. The whole premise is you don't need to be there to chat with the agent for it to do it's job.

I'm definitely not A/B testing anything, it just cycles through a couple titles I thought conveyed the project well. The sub-title directly under it explains it pretty clearly, would you agree with that?

> Manage persistent AI bots with a terminal dashboard, web UI, and declarative configuration.

There's also an interactive emulation of the TUI directly next to both titles in the hero.


Take your upvote, love the old school hn spirit.

Reminds me of when I was speaking at a conference back in the mid 2010's with a presentation titled "Join the dark side of APIs" or something akin to that, where I showed many of the newly popularized "single page apps (SPAs)" relied on undocumented and public APIs, often without any authorization. Immediately followed by a talk by a business type guy on API copyright or something or other.


Ahh, thanks I'll remedy that now, wasn't intentional I'll blame Claude.

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