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

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

#31

Post by nprateem »

There's important stuff to review, 10-20% (eg overall architecture, use of existing utilities/patterns), and there's the specifics of the client code.

My reviews pick out the first and gloss over the latter. They take a few minutes. So I run multiple distinct tasks across agents in antigravity, so there's less chance of conflict. This is on 500k+ line codebase. I'm amazed by the complexity of changes it can handle.

But I agree with his take. Old fashioned programming is dead. Now I do the work of a team of 3 or 4 people each day: AI speed but also no meetings, no discussions, no friction.

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

#32

Post by utopiah »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #16

I don't know what kind of work he's doing that doesn't require actually reading the code to ensure it's appropriately maintainable, but more power to him. I actually like knowing what the hell my code is doing and that it conforms to my standards before committing it. I'll accept his condolences.

We don't have time for safety, or security, or accuracy, or even understandability anymore. We need to move fast! /s

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

#33

Post by woutr_be »

I would love to experience this, but I'm only at the level were I occasionally open ChatGPT or Claude, asked it a question, and then get frustrated because it can't even give me a straight answer, or makes incorrect assumptions.

I can't even imagine having multiple agents write code that somehow works.

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

#34

Post by _sinelaw_ »

johnfn wrote: post #21
_sinelaw_ wrote: post #19

I did when just starting on a new project, it was working well when I had many new components to implement. But as the project matured and stabilized every new feature is cross-cutting and it's impossible to parallelize the work without running into conflicts (design conflicts, where two agents would add similar overlapping mechanisms, and also the usual code conflicts, touching the same files). Also, with project ma…

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.

The harder problem is conflicting design choices, or duplicating similar infra. It means I need to be much more involved in steering individual agents and planning up front (waterfall style), which limits the parallelism further

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

#35

Post by esperent »

Steve is basically an Instagram influencer for coders.

He'll say whatever he can to stay in the spotlight, try to make you feel bad, that you're doing things wrong, that he invented things like agent orchestration when in fact he's just a loudmouth.

Ignore him and his stupid gastown and get on with your life.

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

#36

Post by hrishikesh-s »

Yes, I'm using an agent orchestrator to write code. In fact, a couple of days before Anthropic introduced agent teams, I built a custom tool for myself inside emacs: https://github.com/hrishikeshs/magnus

I basically cycle through prompts and approve/deny/guide agents while looking at the buffer and thinking traces as text scrolls through. It has changed my life :)

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

#37

Post by freakynit »

woutr_be wrote: post #33

I would love to experience this, but I'm only at the level were I occasionally open ChatGPT or Claude, asked it a question, and then get frustrated because it can't even give me a straight answer, or makes incorrect assumptions. I can't even imagine having multiple agents write code that somehow works.

Same here. I've tried agent integrations in VS Code and also have agentic CLIs installed (Claude Code, Gemini cli). But honestly, I still find it more reliable, and often faster, to just ask focused questions, let it generate a method or two, review the output, and copy-paste it into my project. Rinse and repeat. Kind of like how we used to do in the good old days an year back.

For now at least, the full agent workflows feel less efficient and more headache-inducing than being helpful.

And agentic swarms: that's marketing bs.. at least for now.

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

#38

Post by matkoniecz »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> Steve Yegge said he feels "sorry for people" who merely "use Cursor, ask it questions sometimes, review its code really carefully, and then check it in." Steve Yegge is building a multi-agent orchestration system. This is him trying to FOMO listeners into using his project. From what I've observed, the people trying to use herds of agents to work on different things at the same time are just using tokens as fast as…

Also, Steve Yegge is a swindler and scammer, who benefited financially from pump and dump scheme advertised by him on his blog.

See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

Note that some disclaimers, warnings were added afterwards.

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

#39

Post by SkyPuncher »

Glyptodon wrote: post #9

The stumbling block we have is spinning up separate environments for every agent so they have isolation for their branches. I think this is solveable, but we aren't trying to solve it ourselves. In practice it means we aren't doing a lot of agent supervision.

Git worktrees essentially solve this. It essentially copies your repo to a new folder

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

#40

Post by enraged_camel »

politelemon wrote: post #11

Having gone through his interview just now, his advice and experience seems centered around Vibe coding new applications and not really reflective of the reality of the industry. > But I feel sorry for people who are good engineers – or who used to be – and they use Cursor, ask it questions sometimes, review its code really carefully, and then check it in. And I’m like: ‘dude, you’re going to get fired [because you a…

>> I would certainly take a careful person over the likes of yegge who seems to be neither pragmatic, nor an engineer.

What utter nonsense. Yegge has been a programmer for longer than some people on this board have been alive, has worked on a lot of interesting and massively challenging projects and generously shared what he has learned with the community. Questioning his engineering chops is both laughable and absurd.

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