Printing Press
- Source
- youtube.com
- Author
- Peter Yang
- Date
Context
Printing Press turns access to an online service into a command-line tool an can reuse. In this interview, co-creator Matt Van Horn describes its sources: official APIs, community projects on GitHub and, for sites without a public interface, the requests a website makes while someone browses it.
Following a pattern from Peter Steinberger's tools, it can copy a service's data into a local SQLite database, so an agent answers questions without fetching records one by one. The limit is that unofficial endpoints change without notice: Domino's altered its ordering interface the night before launch, forcing a rebuild.
- AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
“agents have a propensity to be lazy. Like they want to make you as happy as possible as fast as possible with as few tokens spent as possible.”
Matt Van Horn
“I certainly don't read any code. I don't even know how to read any code.”
Matt Van Horn
“So, I'd call it BC AC, before Claude and Codex, after. But, it was that Thanksgiving last year where it stopped being a toy.”
Matt Van Horn
“but somehow I'm able to ship things of value, which is crazy and weird and still blowing my mind.”
Matt Van Horn
“the idea was what if anyone could print their own CLI about anything”
Matt Van Horn
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