Fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI

> We believe the purpose of technology is to help humans flourish, so when we talk about AI we start with the human problems we want to solve.

This is something missing from the discussion around AI. There is fatalism or skepticism about AI capabilities vs human usefulness but very little positive philosophy about using AI to augment human capabilities rather than replace them. Even if automating everything were possible it doesn’t mean we need to and I’d argue that we should not want to.

I read the entirety of the README for this and have no idea how this is useful aside from as a prompt DB. Like almost every AI library, it looks like a bunch of gestures in the direction of various hype things that don’t work (e.g. agents).

Looking at the facts and references sections is an exercise in absurdity: by and large, they contain neither objective facts nor credible references. Until the thing can automatically fact-check it is useless, once it does I suspect it will become useless, as knowing what information to trust is most of the problem when trying to gain wisdom from something.

I'm an "AI engineer" as I've seen others loftily describe it: meaning a traditional full stack who works on an AI first code base. I am a heavy user of the OpenAI and Gemini APIs... But I just don't understand what purpose these "AI frameworks" solve. It's almost to the point where I feel stupid for just not getting it.

You write words. Merge your context in. What possible need is there for any library?

The nice thing about this is that it’s all CLI-based. Zero chat, zero web UIs, all UNIX-like composable patterns.

I'm looking forward to the Go rewrite. Purely so it's less of a pain to declaratively install, and I can work it into my workflow.

Cool. Let's take a well-known word prompt and rebrand it to pattern for no reason whatsoever, other than confusion. I know programmers love fancy labels but this is just forced

Honestly this looks cool but setting it up is a bit much. Like... I think the idea of this is cool, but by the time I've done all this setup I've more than likely forgotten what it is I was trying to do to begin with, and even when most of it's already installed I need to make sure several things are running etc. before this becomes essentially a link in the chain. That feels to me like it's going against the ease of integration the project is meant to facilitate a tiny bit. Like somebody else already stated in this thread, having a bit more of a ready-to-go solution, stick it in docker if you must, would probably help here.

d0mine [0] already mentioned this [1] (and was apparently downvoted to oblivion for saying it), but there's already another Python project named Fabric that's been around quite a while now. [2,3] Downvote me too if you like, but it's not gonna change the fact that there's already a project using that name.

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=d0mine

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40893147

- [2]: https://pypi.org/project/fabric/

- [3]: https://www.fabfile.org/

Can we not use the name of my favorite minecraft modloader for some AI project? Thanks.

Small AI boats sail a rough sea in search of the new world. They can sink, never find land, or get sherlocked by massive frigates if they do.

Everyone knows it would be better to fly, i.e. go up one layer and build generic public infra instead. But then they just float off into the obligatory-xkcd-verse: https://xkcd.com/927/

Alan Kay on "AI", human augmentation and Doug Engelbart, June 2024, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868478

  One big distinction in the 1962 time period is that they thought of “machine intelligence” as being a kind of complimentary set of thinking tools that could be “symbiotic” to how humans were able to think. They were not at all thinking about something like a slave or a major domo, but something more like a research assistant or a “Memex” (the latter was a big influence on Doug’s thinking).

  In the very late 60s the “official AI researchers” started to think that something like “intelligent Greek slaves” were needed for the “Romans” (Americans), and became rivals to Doug’s notion of elevating human thinking rather than just elevating power. This was a bad idea then … and it’s a bad idea today.

There is Fabric Python library to execute shell commands remotely over SSH https://pypi.org/project/fabric/

When influencers code.

I vouched for this post. Not sure why it or previous submissions were dead. Seems interesting.