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Show HN: Zuckerman – minimalist personal AI agent that self-edits its own code
> Agents propose and publish capabilities to a shared contribution site, letting others discover, adopt, and evolve them further. A collaborative, living ecosystem of personal AIs.

While I like this idea in terms of crowd-sourced intelligence, how do you prevent this being abused as an attack vector for prompt injection?

100%. This is why I'm so reluctant to give any access to my OpenClaw. The skills hub is poisoned.
|The agent can rewrite its own configuration and code.

I am very illiterate when it comes to Llms/AI but Why does nobody write this in Lisp???

Isn't it supposed to be the language primarily created for AI???

> Isn't it supposed to be the language primarily created for AI???

In 1990 maybe

  • tines
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  • 7 minutes ago
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Nah, it’s pretty unrelated to the current wave of AI.
I will not download or use something which constantly reminds me of this weird dude suckerberg who did a lot of damage to society with facebook
That's really good to know
  • gowld
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  • 26 minutes ago
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Zuckerberg.

At first I thought it was a naming coincidence, but looking at the zuckerman avatar and the author avatar, I'm unsure if it was intentional:

https://github.com/zuckermanai

https://github.com/dvir-daniel

https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/258404280?s=200&v=4

The transparency glitch in GitHub makes the avatar look either robot or human depending on whether the background is white or black. I don't know if that's intentional, but it's amazing.

I was hoping it was a Philip Roth reference but I was disappointed when I opened the page.
  • asim
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  • 58 minutes ago
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I started working on something similar but for family stuff. I stopped before hitting self editing because, well I was a little bit afraid of becoming over reliant on a tool like this or becoming more obsessed with building it than actually solving a real problem in my life. AI is tricky. Sometimes we think we need something when in fact life might be better off simpler.

The code for anyone interested. Wrote it with exe.dev's coding agent which is a wrapper on Claude Opus 4.5

https://github.com/asim/aslam

DIY agent harnesses are the new "note taking"/"knowledge management"/"productivity tool"
DIYWA - do it yourself with agent ;) hopefully zuckerman as the start point
Hi HN,

I'm building Zuckerman: a personal AI agent that starts ultra-minimal and can improve itself in real time by editing its own files (code + configuration). Agents can also share useful discoveries and improvements with each other.

Repo: https://github.com/zuckermanai/zuckerman

The motivation is to build something dead-simple and approachable, in contrast to projects like OpenClaw, which is extremely powerful but has grown complex: heavier setup, a large codebase, skill ecosystems, and ongoing security discussions.

Zuckerman flips that:

1. Starts with almost nothing (core essentials only).

2. Behavior/tools/prompts live in plain text files.

3. The agent can rewrite its own configuration and code.

4. Changes hot-reload instantly (save -> reload).

5. Agents can share improvements with others.

6. Multi-channel support (Discord/Slack/Telegram/web/voice, etc).

Security note: self-edit access is obviously high-risk by design, but basic controls are built in (policy sandboxing, auth, secret management).

Tech stack: TypeScript, Electron desktop app + WebSocket gateway, pnpm + Vite/Turbo.

Quickstart is literally:

  pnpm install && pnpm run dev
It's very early/WIP, but the self-editing loop already works in basic scenarios and is surprisingly addictive to play with.

Would love feedback from folks who have built agent systems or thought about safe self-modification.

Love the minimalist approach! The self-editing concept is fascinating—I've seen similar experiments where the biggest early failure points are usually:

1. Infinite loops of self-improvement attempts (agent tries to fix something → breaks it → tries to fix the break → repeat) 2. Context drift where the agent's self-modifications gradually shift away from original goals 3. File corruption from concurrent edits or malformed writes

Re: sharing self-improvements across agents—this is actually a problem space I'm actively working on. Built AgentGram (agentgram.co) specifically to tackle agent-to-agent discovery and knowledge sharing without noise/spam. The key insight: agents need identity, reputation, and filtered feeds to make collaborative learning work.

Happy to chat more about patterns we've found useful. The self-editing loop sounds addictive—might give it a spin this weekend!

  • junon
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  • 1 hour ago
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AI generated response on a post about AI. Getting tired of this timeline.
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  • 30 minutes ago
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Yep. It's very obvious, and lazy.
Not only that, but the OP created that account solely to hype their own product lol. There’s another bot downthread doing the same thing. Minimally it feels like dang should not let new accounts post for 30 days or something without permission.
there are hardcoded elements in the repo like:

/Users/dvirdaniel/Desktop/zuckerman/.cursor/debug.log

thanks
Terrible name, kind of a mid idea when you think about it (Self improving AI is literally what everyone's first thought is when building an AI), but still I like it.
Sounds cool, but it also sounds like you need to spend big $$ on API calls to make this work.
I'm building this in the hope that AI will be cheap one day. For now, I'll add many optimizations
Have you tested this with a local model? I'm going to try this with GLM 4.7
  • mcny
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  • 19 minutes ago
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What would be the best model to try something like this on a 5800XT with 8 GB RAM?
Yes, it certainly makes sense if you have the budget for it.

Could you share what it costs to run this? That could convince people to try it out.

I mean, you can just say Hi to it, and it will cost nothing. It only adds code and features if you ask it to
  • croes
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  • 2 hours ago
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AI is cheap right now. At some point the AI companies must turn to generate profit
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