Blog Post Week 6

We started by brainstorming what autonomous agents should actually do, like browsing the web or handling service requests. To avoid reinventing the wheel, we decided to build on an existing framework instead of starting from scratch.

Our first choice was OpenClaw, but the codebase was a mess. The architecture was too tightly coupled, making it nearly impossible to modify or extend without breaking things. We needed something more modular and maintainable.

Blog Post Week 6

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of LLM orchestration, specifically how to move beyond basic prompting and into using local tools for orchestration my own tasks. I already have openclaw on my machine to do work, but the tools are still pretty terrible. My goal is to work on a project where we’re expanding the frontier of tools into things I find useful.

Blog Post Week 5

The biggest takeaway from my own group work this week was realizing that writing the code is only half the battle. I learned that you have to spend an equal amount of time simplifying and documenting your work so that others can actually build on it without hitting a wall. Watching the other groups’ presentations and extensions reinforced this, as the projects that stood out weren’t just the ones with the most complex features, but the ones that communicated their logic clearly. It became obvious that technical skill is wasted if your teammates can’t understand your interface, and that the “human” part is clear.

Project Evaluation — NautilusTrader

I was one of the students who recommended the NautilusTrader project, so I was glad to see others evaluating it closely. One observation that stood out — and that I agree with — is that the lead maintainer appears to be largely a single individual. I’ve personally seen him tagged across hundreds of Discord threads, which suggests he’s carrying a heavy support and development load. Recognizing this is important when evaluating a project’s sustainability and contributor experience, because a single-maintainer bottleneck can both slow progress and create delays in reviewing pull requests.

We’ve decided to build our project using the Gemini local LLM platform. Making that choice was a turning point for the group—it allowed us to stop debating and start defining our actual technical requirements.

I thought the code of conduct activity reflects to me the differences in compensation and intent. With Go, it is almost wholly maintained internally by google engineers who are compensated purely for maintaining and/or advancing Golang. Versus with the general code of conduct, it’s clear this is meant to bridge engineers with different technical capacities, timezones, ideas, motives, etc. are not all necessarily aligned. We get the big tent method that can more representative of a general swath of interests, versus a open source model funded wholly by a corporation’s engineers that act with a certain bias but are more likely to meet the objectives.

Hi, my name is Rohit and I’m a junior majoring in CS and Finance. Week 1 was about learning a bit more of who’s in my class, the history of open source, clarifying misinterpretations (open source != free).