July 07, 2026

#487 Minimum requirements

27 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

dust - a better du

Hermes Agent: The AI agent that grows with you

llm-coding-agent 0.1a0

Extras

Joke

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Michael #1: dust - a better du

du + Rust = dust - a fast, visual, intuitive disk-usage CLI

Run dust and immediately see the biggest directories and files without piping through sort, head, or awk

Smart recursive output focuses on what matters instead of dumping every folder

Colored bars show relative size and parent/child hierarchy, making “where did the space go?” obvious

Perfect for Python projects bloated by .venv, caches, Docker volumes, downloaded datasets, and local AI models

Install via brew, cargo install du-dust, conda-forge, Scoop, Snap, deb-get, or GitHub releases

Calvin #2: A Way better ARchive format for Python packaging

war - new archive format spec from Astral (same team as uv/ruff), v0.0.2, still no binary encoding defined yet

Header-Index-Store layout: header IDs the file, index maps names to store offsets, store holds compressed data

Index uses a finite-state transducer (FST) to dedupe common path prefixes across entry names

Supports three entry types (file, directory, link) and three compression modes (store/DEFLATE/zstd), plus an "executable" metadata flag

Unpacking is atomic - writes to a temp dir, then renames into place, so a failed extract never leaves a half-unpacked directory

Strict name-segment rules (no NUL/control chars, no leading/trailing whitespace, blocks Windows-reserved names like CON/PRN) to avoid path traversal and cross-platform footguns

Michael #3: Hermes Agent: The AI agent that grows with you

Hermes Agent is an open-source, Python-built AI agent framework from Nous Research - think ChatGPT-style assistant, but connected to your tools, files, shell, browser, calendar, memory, and messaging apps

I’m using it in Discord as a long-running agent conversation, not just a one-off chatbot session

Hermes can connect through a gateway to platforms like Discord, Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, email, webhooks, and more - so the same assistant can follow you across surfaces

In my setup, I can send Hermes voice/text from Discord, keep project context across turns as threads, and ask it to actually do things: read GitHub repos, run commands, edit files, schedule calendar events, generate drafts, and verify results

A fun workflow: I can trigger one-shot actions from an Apple Watch shortcut - dictate a request, send it to Hermes, and have the agent execute it asynchronously

Hermes has persistent memory, so it can remember durable preferences and facts - for example, how I like my research formatted

It also has “skills,” which are reusable procedures the agent can load later, so Hermes can self-improve over time instead of rediscovering the same workflow repeatedly

It supports scheduled jobs / cron-style automations, so it can proactively watch for releases, send summaries, run checks, or remind you about things

It’s provider-agnostic: OpenRouter, Anthropic, Google, xAI, local models, Nous Portal, and others

The big idea: Hermes turns an LLM from “a chat box I visit” into “an agent I can reach from anywhere that knows my workflows and can take real actions and learns over time.”

Calvin #4: llm-coding-agent 0.1a0

Simon Willison built a Claude/Codex-style coding agent on top of his llm library, using an alpha of the llm package plus his python-lib-template-repo

Built almost entirely via prompted TDD - asked an agent to write a spec.md, then commit + implement with red/green tests, occasionally hitting a real OpenAI key to sanity-check

Shipped to PyPI as an alpha: uvx --prerelease=allow --with llm-coding-agent llm code

Tool set mirrors familiar coding-agent primitives: read_file, edit_file (exact string replace + diff), write_file, list_files, search_files, execute_command

Also exposes a Python API - CodingAgent(model="gpt-5.5", root=..., approve=True).run(...) - which Simon didn't ask for but got anyway

Demo: llm code --yolo told GPT-5.5 to build a SwiftUI CLI clock; model correctly noted SwiftUI isn't really CLI-friendly and still produced an ASCII-art time display

Extras

Calvin:

Slides, but for developers https://sli.dev/

Wanna reduce your token usage…. only issue is that its lossy https://github.com/teamchong/pxpipe

PEP 772 - Python Packaging Council inaugural election dates set, nominations open July 28, voting September 1-15

Michael:

What the pls? revisited!

Joke: Min requirements for Linux

...more

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By Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker

4.7

212212 ratings