I too used to be a skeptic of the whole "agent-swarms" hype. But I do find some patterns useful with ultracode:
- parallelism: "if it makes sense, use ultracode to do this thoroughly" Claude decides if this is the type of task that can benefit from a dynamic workflow. For example where there is a large number of similar independent sub-tasks, it can choose to set up a dynamic workflow, and it even sets up verifiers/tests etc to validate its work. In some cases it pushes back and decides not to set up a dynamic workflow and instead works on the task directly.
- verification loops: "Set up a dynamic workflow with adversarial checkers, and iterate until they are all green, up to some sensible limit". Similarly, I can include code-simplification steps and documentation-update steps.
These patterns help me leave it unattended for longer periods of time and return to a reasonable assurance of correct code.