alt Hacker NewsIt always seems bizarre to me that people complain about software now. You can just write the thing you want. If you want to do things in parallel do them in parallel. Claude Code will allow you to run multiple instances in the same folder and let them communicate. Previously I used to let them intermediate through a communication bus but now they seem to be able to talk to each other.
I let most agents work asynchronously and don't pay attention so I don't care that much about the sequential nature. But if it's a problem for you then fix your harness. This is a bit like saying "Why are shoes so shit? There's a stone in one and it just gets stuck there and your foot steps on it and it hurts". Take off the shoe, and shake out the rock. Put the shoe back on. You have the power.
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Yeah I regularly have 5+ agents working in 1 repo simultaneously even modifying the same file. Since they were all running on my singular local machine. Builds and tests were interfering at 1 point so 1 automatically proposed writing a single script that basically mutex locked it with appropriate wait and timeouts. It had even added this to my own personal agentic todo backlog. They've proposed new skills for me.
They even have split my decisions to human decisions. Proposed and approved work. They can iterate on approved work without me just fine.
And I only just started with agentic coding in last few weeks before that I was mostly a copy paste chat person.
But you didn't just write the thing you wanted, you're relying on other software that happens to do it, and if you were happy with the communication bus you would've stuck with that.
Your shoe analogy also breaks down because really the shoe is the issue, not the stone. And expecting everybody to make their own shoes is, well, I mean we just don't do it that way anymore for good reason. Let the cobblers make the shoes, and the runners wear them.
I've now been trying for six months to get agents to produce decent code. As in readable / easy to follow, easy to change. I'm doing something really wrong. It's killing me. Everything it produces will work, buts it diabolically over complicated. I've built skills that have helped. But not massively. I've used other people's skills, in particular Matt pococks grill me and Dex hortlys show me. These have helped a bit. I work in enterprise, I want to be proud of what I'm producing, but trying to understand and then cajole and agents code into something that's good is exhausting. If anyone here has been through this and can share how they got through this, I'd really appreciate the help.
Edit: I have access to codex, vscode, GitHub co pilot cli and all anthropic and openai models (excluding mythos).