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Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

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Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#81

Post by samsolomon »

birken wrote: post #75

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code

Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are.

https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#82

Post by apsurd »

joshribakoff wrote: post #42

This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is buildi…

OT: Your visual on "stacked PRs" instantly made me understand what a stacked PR is. Thank you!

I had read about them before but for whatever reason it never clicked.

Turns out I already work like this, but I use commits as "PRs in the stack" and I constantly try to keep them up to date and ordered by rebasing, which is a pain.

Given my new insight with the way you displayed it, I had a chat with chatGPT and feel good about giving it a try:

    1. 2-3 branches based on a main feature branch
    2. can rebase base branch with same frequency, just don't overdo it, conflicts should be base-isolated.
    3. You're doing it wrong if conflicts cascade deeply and often
    4. Yes merge order matters, but tools can help and generally the isolation is the important piece

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#83

Post by serial_dev »

czhu12 wrote: post #66

The problem I’ve been having is that when Claude generates copious amounts of code, it makes it way harder to review than small snippets one at a time. Some would argue there’s no point reviewing the code, just test the implementation and if it works, it works. I still am kind of nervous doing this in critical projects. Anyone just YOLO code for projects that’s not meant to be one time, but fully intend to have to be…

In a professional setting where you still have coding standards, and people will review your code, and the code actually reaches hundreds of thousands of real users, handling one agent at a time is plenty for me. The code output is never good enough, and it makes up stuff even for moderately complicated debugging ("Oh I can clearly see the issue now", I heard it ten times before and you were always wrong!)

I do use them, though, it helps me, search, understand, narrow down and ideate, it's still a better Google, and the experience is getting better every quarter, but people letting tens or hundreds of agents just rip... I can't imagine doing it.

For personal throwaway projects that you do because you want to reach the end output (as opposed to learning or caring), sure, do it, you verify it works roughly, and be done with it.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#84

Post by fragmede »

birken wrote: post #75

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#85

Post by byproxy »

apsurd wrote: post #82
joshribakoff wrote: post #42

This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is buildi…

OT: Your visual on "stacked PRs" instantly made me understand what a stacked PR is. Thank you! I had read about them before but for whatever reason it never clicked. Turns out I already work like this, but I use commits as "PRs in the stack" and I constantly try to keep them up to date and ordered by rebasing, which is a pain. Given my new insight with the way you displayed it, I had a chat with chatGPT and feel good…

Isn’t this just “Gitflow”?

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/...

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#86

Post by nonethewiser »

fragmede wrote: post #84
birken wrote: post #75

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?

>Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves

Can you help me envision what you're saying? It's async - you will have to wait whether its good or not. And in theory the better it is the more time you'd have to comment here, right?

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#87

Post by nonethewiser »

basedrum wrote: post #25

How is this different from GSD: https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done I've been using that and it's excellent

GSD was the first project management framework I used. Initially I loved it because it felt like I was so much better organized.

As time went on I felt like the organization was kind of an illusion. It demanded something from me and steered Claude, but ultimately Claude is doing whatever it's going to do.

I went black to just raw-dogging it with lots of use of planning mode.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#88

Post by thevinter »

fragmede wrote: post #84
birken wrote: post #75

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?

You're making it sound like before agents existed HN was a ghost town because everyone was too busy building ImportantThingTM by hand

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#89

Post by nonethewiser »

ecto wrote: post #47
mohsen1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swarm is actually OpenAI's terminology https://github.com/openai/swarm

Swarm is actually bee terminology

I think we can all agree Swarm is a proprietary term coined by LargeCorpB for a project that never really got off the ground but definitely can't share the name with any other commercial venture.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#90

Post by stingraycharles »

dceddia wrote: post #74
stingraycharles wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s even less of a feature, Claude Code already has subagents; this new feature just ensures Claude Code actually uses this for implementation. imho the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough to pull this off; they’re trying to do it to preserve context, but the level of detail in the plans is not nearly enough for it to be reliable.

Interesting about the level of detail. I’ve noticed that myself but I haven’t done much to address it yet. I can imagine some ideas (ask it for more detail, ask it to make a smaller plan and add detail to that) but I’m curious if you have any experience improving those plans.

I’m trying to solve this myself by implementing a whole planner workflow at https://github.com/solatis/claude-config

Effectively it tries to resolve all ambiguities by making all decisions explicit — if the source cannot be resolved to documentation or anything, it’s asked to the user.

It also tries to capture all “invisible knowledge” by documenting everything, so that all these decisions and business context are captured in the codebase again.

Which - in theory - should make long term coding using LLMs more sane.

The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan, but it’s much less likely to make silly choices.

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