Show HN: Extra-steps.dev – AI hype mapped to CS primitives (opens in new tab)

(extra-steps.dev)

2 pointsfunemployed1mo ago2 comments

I built a reference site that maps AI marketing buzzwords to the CS primitives underneath them. Every entry follows the same format: "X is just Y with extra steps."

MCP? JSON-RPC over stdio. Agents? A while loop with an LLM call. RAG? A search index + string concatenation. Prompt engineering? natural language + markdown

The site has an origins section for buzzwords that already graduated — Docker (cgroups + namespaces), Kubernetes (reconciliation loops watching YAML), Serverless (someone else's process on someone else's computer). And of course, BrandonM's 2007 comment on the Dropbox YC demo.

Each entry has expandable pseudocode on the index page, detailed breakdowns with citations on the detail pages.

The motivation: I keep having conversations at work where a product executive suggests that we "orchestrate APIs using MCP" or asks about implementing "agentic memory" in our web apps and the fastest path to a productive conversation is showing them the code underneath the buzzword. I wanted a community-based reference site like caniuse or mdn that I loved when learning to code. I couldn't find one, so I built one.

  14 entries so far. Static Astro site, open source, PRs welcome.

  https://extra-steps.dev

2 comments

amabito1mo ago

Nice reference. If agents are essentially “a while loop with an LLM call,” then one missing category might be execution control.

In distributed systems we rarely let loops run unbounded — we add budgets, backoff, circuit breakers, etc. With agents, it’s interesting that most frameworks focus on observability (traces, logs) but not on hard containment of the loop itself.

If you were extending the mapping, would “agent budget limits” fit better as a rate limiter, a circuit breaker, or something closer to a bounded work queue?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse