#487 Minimum requirements

**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** Watch on YouTube **About the show** Sponsored by us! Support our work through: - Our courses at Talk Python - Consulting from Six Feet Up **Connect with the hosts** - Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn - Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn - Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually **Tuesday at 7am PT**. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. **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