alt Hacker NewsDon't Wait for Claude
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“Don’t pay attention to what Claude is doing, just spam your way through code and commands and hope nothing went wrong and you catch any code issues in review afterwards” is what this sounds like.
I will run parallel Claude sessions when I have a related cluster of bugs which can be fixed in parallel and all share similar context / mental state (yet are sufficiently distinct not to just do in one session with subagents).
Beyond that, parallel sessions to maybe explore some stuff but only one which is writing code or running commands that need checking (for trust / safety / security reasons).
Any waiting time is spent planning next steps (eg writing text files with prompts for future tasks) or reviewing what Claude previously did and writing up lists (usually long ones) of stuff to improve (sometimes with drafts prompts or notes of gotchas that Claude tripped up on the first time which I can prompt around in future).
Spend time thinking, not just motoring your way through tokens.
Just show us the prompt you used to produce this post instead of the output
When computer works, it's sword fighting time. I don't make the rules
If you are letting Claude run for seven minutes at a time, you aren't thinking hard enough about what you're building.
If you start trying to juggle multiple agents, you are doubling down on the wrong strategy.
I'd offer a different approach: think about how you're going to validate. An only-slightly-paraphrased Claude conversation I had yesterday:
> me: I want our agent to know how to invoke skills.
> Claude: [...]
> Claude: Done. That's the whole change. No MCP config, no new env vars, no caller changes needed.
> me: ok, test it.
> Claude: This is a big undertaking.
That's the hard part, right? Maybe Claude will come back with questions, or you'll have to kick it a few times. But eventually, it'll declare "I fixed the bug!" or summarize that the feature is implemented. Then what?
I get a ton of leverage figuring this out what I need to see to trust the code. I work on that. Figure out if there's a script you can write that'll exercise everything and give you feedback (2nd claude session!). Set up your dev env so playwright will Just Work and you can ask Claude to click around and give you screenshots of it all working. Grep a bunch and make yourself a list of stuff to review, to make sure it didn't miss anything.
This looks absolutely wonderful. Is it possible to run against Claude remotely (e.g. on a VM?). Or should I ask Claude to add that?
was this written using a LinkedIn skill
The old saying is "don't multitask" but apparently that time is gone.
I wonder what people think about this. I know there is a class of SWE/dev who now consider oneself as "the manager of agents". Good luck to them and articles like this would work for these people.
I'm not there yet and I hope I don't have to. I'm not a LLM and my mental model is (I believe) more than a markdown. But I haven't figured out the mental model that works for me, still staring at the terminal Claude blinking the cursor, sticking to "don't multitask" dogma.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this workflow. Perhaps a small tutorial / walkthrough hosted on YouTube or asciinema might help people understand.
Or, wait and take a little break so you don't burn out. I miss the days where you had to wait for code to compile or for your "big data" job to run, so you could give yourself a little mini break.
Of course there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
> The fix is obvious: work on something else while Claude runs.
Disagree. The fix is actually counter-intuitive: give Claude smaller tasks so that it completes them in less time and you remain in the driver's seat.
> jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code.
Is this sarcasm? If not, I wonder why.
Wtf is this LLM slop
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Lots of LLM-isms in the article from a very casual scan so going to assume nothing interesting here
Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives me time to think as well.When I have a list of simple tasks I just tell it to the model and it executes one after another.