alt Hacker NewsAm I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily, and don't need more than that.
I also spend most of my time reviewing the spec to make sure the design is right. Once I'm done, the coding agent can take 10 minutes or 30 minutes. I'm not really in that much of a rush.
Replies
I went the same way. At first I was splitting off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, then I realized I just can't keep up with it all, running few agents around one issue in one directory is fast enough. Way faster than before and I can still follow what's happening.
> Am I supposed to be impressed by this?
No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)
From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cases.
I'm on the same ship. Running 2 agents and seeing a vast amount of productivity increase. Not always though. Sometimes the solutions are very over-engineered and I need to guide the agent to where I want it to go. I do a lot of micro-management, which is totally not where people with agent-orchestras seem to go nowadays.
yup, agree - i spend most of my time reviewing the spec. The highest leverage time is now deciding what to work on and then working on the spec. I ended up building the verify skill (https://github.com/opslane/verify) because I wanted to ensure claude follows the spec. I have found that even after you have the spec - it can sometimes not follow it and it takes a lot of human review to catch those issues.
I would be impressed if I could say "here's $100 turn it into $1000" but you still gotta do the thinking.
agreed, honestly if I see my agent "run" for more than 5 minutes or so I get very suspicious that its doing anything of value other than burning credits because more often than not its just talking to its self or running in loops. I also find the whole multi-agent stuff to be suspect most the time, I don't know that I have seen multiple agents running in parallel do anything that a single agent with good guidance couldn't do synchronously in about the same amount of time.
They are probably paying for expensive subscriptions and want to utilize them. Unfortunately we aren't past the slop stage so a lot of the business logic probably has bugs and unused defensive code that snowballs the more features AI adds.
[dead]
Yes I'm still not really understanding this "run agents overnight" thing. Most of the time if I use claude it's done in 5-20 minutes. I've never wanted to have work done for me overnight...tomorrow is already plenty of time for more work, it's not going anywhere, and my employer isn't paying me to produce overnight.