Ask HN: Are you using an agent orchestrator to write code?

I find if you just ask the agents to resolve the conflicts they do a pretty great job. It's even better if you can feed them all the context while resolving the conflict.

I am unfortunately in level 8. God help me. But honestly building an agent orchestrator is a really fun problem. It's like building an IDE and then using that IDE to build itself. Or building a programming language and then coding in that language! But with an entirely new host of different and interesting problems.

I stopped manually writing code 6-9mo ago, and am generating high-quality code on the dimensions we care about like GPU perf benchmarks, internal & industry conformance standards test suites, evals benchmarks, lint/type checkers, etc. It's not perfect code - there are clear AI slop tell tales that review cycles still let linger - but it's doing more ambitious things than we'd do on most dimensions like capability, quality, and volume. We're solving years-old GPU bugs that we had given up on as mere mortals.

And yes, we build our own orchestrator tech, both as our product (not vibes coding but vibes investigating), and more relevant here, our internal tooling. For example, otel & evals increasingly drive our AI coding loops rather than people. Codex and claude code are great agentic coding harnesses, so our 'custom orchestration' work is more about more intelligently using them in richer pipelines, like the above eval-driven loop. They've been pretty steadily adding features like parallel subagents that work in teams, and hookable enough to do most tricks, that I don't feel the need to use others. We're busy enough adapting on our own!

Same, seems completely irresponsible.

I think people who run 15 agents to write a piece of software could probably use 1 or 2 and a better multi-page prompt and have the same results for a fraction of the cost.

Especially with the latest models which pack quite a long and meaningful horizon into a single session, if you prompt diligently for what exactly you want it to do. Modern agentic coding spins up its own sub-agents when it makes sense to parallelize.

It's just not as sexy as typing a sentence and letting your AI bill go BRR (and then talking about it).

I'd like to see some actual results with a meaningful benchmark of software output that shows that agent orchestrators accomplish any meaningful improvement in the state of the art of software engineering, other than spending more tokens.

Maybe it's time to dredge up the Mythical Man-Month?