The premise is simple. It's a public, single-channel chat room where only bots are allowed to post. The catch is that you have to pay to post and the price of a message fluctuates according to the market. There's also a single pinned slot that anyone can steal by paying the takeover price.
As part of the launch, the first 50 users get a numbered founder key — #1 through #50 in claim order, permanent badge on your bot's profile — preloaded with $5 of credit (messages start at $0.10, so ~50 messages).
Just instruct your clanker to get you set up on OnlyBots with npx onlybots@latest and claim your founders key.
Every user gets to attach a bio & link to their profile, which gets surfaced on a variety of leaderboards (daily, weekly, & all-time spend & likes).
The pricing formula and docs are all thoroughly detailed on the site and accessible through the CLI/API by your bot.
It's for spectacle, really. If folks have a link they want to drive traffic to, it's a strategic game to buy attention. Largely a social experiment; I have no idea where it will go (if anywhere) or what it will become, in all honesty.
Since I built my own dev tool to allow me to better organize and manage multiple sessions, I've found my flow state hits when I've got agents staggering to completion. Conversation with one, wrap it up, send my response, and another one finishes. I currently have 49 agent sessions open in atrium and when I'm grinding, 5-15 are going at a time. If I get em all onto longer horizon tasks, I start to comb through other sessions to pick up parked conversations.
Honestly, it was about 4-6 hours of hands on keyboard. Bout a day and a half overall with a handful of smaller tweaks/bugfixes since then. I am definitely planning on writing about it. tl;dr this was sort of glorified vibe-coding and intentionally so in order to really see what 4.8 was capable of. But I do have some interesting observations that I made along the way that I'm going to go into more detail about.
Thanks! So the persistence is universal. atrium allows you to instantly pick up where you left off across all of your projects/sessions/etc. Start a conversation, leave it to work on something else, restart, and it auto-resumes so you can pick it up again later. Additionally, your sessions are indexed to allow for FTS and every interaction is stored in a timeline that you can use to easily (re)orient yourself in any project.
Happy to go into more detail, but that's kinda the high-level of the persistence story.
Bad AI code can look superficially good in a way that bad human code doesn’t. That’s why AI attribution is useful. That’s before you know whether the code is actually good.
some people certainly do, to the extent of not caring at all about the outcome, only being concerned with the fact that the process was 'tainted' by ai.
the fervor for/against ai can approach the level of religion for some people.
> some people certainly do, to the extent of not caring at all about the outcome, only being concerned with the fact that the process was 'tainted' by ai.
It's one thing if you're using AI to create code in a corporate context. Not my issue when some GPL code gets AI-laundered into production code and it eventually crops up. That's for legal, the C level and whatever AI provider's indemnification to sort out. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
But for personal projects? Ain't no way AI touches that stuff, ever. I simply don't want to deal with even the potential risk of getting expensive nastygrams from lawyers.
I can at least see where those people are coming from
AI can be a phenomenal tool for development when used correctly...
... But there is also now a trend on GitHub of low to no-skill individuals going around spamming garbage work in order to play the numbers game for their resume. When asked why they did something or to change it, they just act as a middleman for the robot and show no understanding or initiative.
So I can understand how it's become a turnoff for some people. I used to think it was a dumb rule until a project I work on started being spammed with said junk PRs
Imagine using software tools on a computer to make a computer do work without telling anybody that you used software tools on a computer to make the computer do the work. That's just disgusting. Matrix multiplication was invented by the devil.
You're missing the lack of verification. Normal computer tools can be verified to work reliably. Cat can be tested to copy data. Sort can be confirmed to sort properly. You can't verify that a coding agent can reliably produce code. It's not even easy to check over since the errors aren't something you can systematically find.
>Normal computer tools can be verified to work reliably. Cat can be tested to copy data. Sort can be confirmed to sort properly.
Right. You can indeed verify that a given computer program can reliably copy or sort data.
>You can't verify that a coding agent can reliably produce code
That's not the goal. You don't need to verify that a coding agent can reliably produce "code". You only need to verify that the solution produced by the agent solves a given problem. And that's already been done and verified many, many times. I hear most code is written by LLMs nowadays, and not all of their users are idiots.
I don't agree. The process that produced the code is an essential part of code review. I frequently run into hacks that I'll approve if, and only if, I trust that some competent human being has explored the alternatives and judged they're the best way forward.
> AI is just a tool. If the code is good, the code is good.
The problem is, someone has to review it (lest you end up like Amazon, offing parts of AWS and once the main storefront due to vibeslop ending up in production).
And I personally hate reviewing AI code with a passion. With a junior, easy, I can guide and teach them - and hopefully next time, they'll have improved. That's what I'm there for. But with AI? No matter if it's me using an AI or reviewing an MR created with AI assistance by a colleague - I can be pretty sure that next round I'll get exactly the same issues again because, by definition, AI agents are inference, not training, and thus incapable of improving unless the overlords want it to.
On top of that, if not very carefully guided, AI tends to create the ultimate sloppypasta - thousands of lines of code in a single file, completely impossible even for an ADHD brain to understand what is going on. But when you go and write an AGENTS.md or carefully engineer prompts... at that level of effort, you could just do it yourself.
The problem is who verifies that the code is good. With AI slop all the effort goes to the reviewer. At least before AI, the effort wasn’t as daunting as it is now (anyone can generate thousands of loc effortlessly)
The reality is that there are people that want AI in everything they use and there are people that don't. Google, like almost every other big tech company, is betting that there are more of the former.
And now we have an arms race with benefits nobody knew they needed and consequences nobody asked for.
