This feels somewhat ahistorical.

The US has nearly always been successful in terms of conventional firepower and individual operations. E.g. in 2003 the US overthrew Saddam's government in a matter of weeks. The US won most battles in Vietnam. That doesn't change the fact that the strategic outcomes and long-term track record are poor. Trying to draw a link to AI or the current state of the US military feels flimsy.

Anyway, the recurring Big Question throughout the Culture series is "how should a highly progressive, developed, and egalitarian society act when it meets others who are not?". The US is sliding further and further from that ideal, and you can argue whether it was ever close.

Haven't tried them in enough depth to compare.

Nanobot's was not great (cron + a HEARTBEAT.md meant two ways to do things, which would confuse the AI). But because the implementation is so simple, I could improve it in a few minutes in my own fork!

This is an interesting idea! I searched around and it looks like there's [ast-grep](https://ast-grep.github.io/), an AST-aware CLI that can search and refactor code -- and you can expose it to your AI agent using a skill (https://github.com/ast-grep/agent-skill).

Not exactly symbolic AI, but pretty cool nonetheless.

And they love to do this in spite of writing "NO FALLBACKS" etc. in your AGENTS.md.