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faangguyindia 7 hours ago

I actually use IRC in my coding agent

Change into rooms to get into different prompts.

using it as remote to change any project, continue from anywhere.

AbanoubRodolf 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The rooms-as-contexts pattern is underrated. You get namespace isolation for free without building any session management. Switch channels, switch project, switch system prompt, and the conversation history stays where it belongs.

The other win is client agnosticism. I can connect from a terminal on my workstation, a mobile IRC client on my phone, or a web client if I'm on someone else's machine, and I'm talking to the same agent with the same history. That's much harder to replicate with a custom REST API without building your own auth and session layer.

The backscroll is the part that makes it feel persistent. The agent feels "always on" even though it's just responding to messages, because the channel history gives you the full context of what you asked it last time.

chatmasta 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This sounds a lot cleaner than the approach I was thinking of with a separate bot for each role. I like it.

3 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
chatmasta 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does IRC still have message length limits or was that only in the early versions of the protocol?

entropie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I guess you just send newlines as in multiple messages and disable flood protection on the server or whitelist your bot.

stackghost 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

RFC 1459 originally stipulated that messages not exceed 512 bytes in length, inclusive of control characters, which meant the actual usable length for message text was less. When the protocol's evolution was re-formalized in 2000 via RFCs 2810-13 the 512-byte limit was kept.

However, most modern IRC implementations support a subset of the IRCv3 protocol extensions which allow up to 8192 bytes for "message tags", i.e. metadata and keep the 512-byte message length limit purely for historical and backwards-compatibility reasons for old clients that don't support the v3 extensions to the protocol.

So the answer, strictly speaking, is yes. IRC does still have message length limits, but practically speaking it's because there's a not-insignificant installed base of legacy clients that will shit their pants if the message lengths exceed that 512-byte limit, rather than anything inherent to the protocol itself.

d0963319287 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

achille 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

same here, would love to compare notes