Talking Shit About AI Agents by Scott Werner

Ask seven people what an "AI agent" is and you'll get nine answers. One person will change their mind twice.

When we can't name something, it usually means we're looking at something genuinely new.

In this talk, I'll argue that what we're calling 'agents' might actually be a new programming paradigm hiding in plain sight. Think about what makes up an agent: an LLM, a prompt, a loop, some tools, a way to talk to it. It's essentially a little computer that receives messages and interprets them. That's suspiciously close to the way Alan Kay describes objects.

We'll take a detour through Xerox PARC circa 1972, explore what Kay actually meant by "object-oriented" (spoiler: not what we've been doing), and discover how LLMs accidentally achieved something he was reaching for: semantic late binding, where the meaning of a message is negotiated at the moment of receipt.

Then I'll demo a minimal Ruby environment where markdown files are the program and Ruby is just the scaffolding. You'll see prompt-objects receive messages, interpret them, talk to each other, and even create new prompt-objects at runtime.

Our Speaker

Scott Werner has been building AI-powered tools in Ruby at Sublayer for the past 3 years, including Sublayer, VSM, and MonkeysPaw. He's the organizer of Artificial Ruby, an AI-focused Ruby meetup in New York City. And he also writes about the intersection of programming and AI at https://worksonmymachine.ai/ where he frequently shares products, demos, and open source code primarily written in Ruby.

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