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Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

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Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#121

Post by ctoth »

stingraycharles wrote: post #50
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…

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.

I agree with this. Any time I make a plan I have to go back and fill it in, fill it in, what did we miss, tdd, yada yada. And yes, I have all this stuff in CLAUDE.md.

You start to get a sense for what size plan (in kilobytes) corresponds to what level of effort. Verification adds effort, and there's a sort of ... Rocket equation? in that the more infrastructure you put in to handle like ... the logistics of the plan, the less you have for actual plan content, which puts a cap on the size of an actionable plan. If you can hit the sweet spot though... GTFO.

I also like to iterate several times in plan mode with Claude before just handing the whole plan to Codex to melt with a superlaser. Claude is a lot more ... fun/personable to work with? Codex is a force of nature.

Another important thing I will do is now that launching plans clear context, it's good to get out of planning mode early, hit an underspecified bit, go back into planning mode and say something like "As you can see the plan was underspecified, what will the next agent actually need to succeed?" and iterate that way before we actually start making moves. This is made possible by lots of explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md for Claude to tell me what it's planning/thinking before it acts. Suppressing the toolcall reflex and getting actual thought out helps so much.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#123

Post by pron »

serial_dev wrote: post #83
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 t…

This is my problem with the whole "can LLMs code?" discussion. Obviously, LLMs can produce code, well even, much like a champion golfer can get a hole in one. But can they code in the sense of "the pilot can fly the plane", i.e. barring a catastrophic mechanical malfunction or a once-in-a-decade weather phenomennon, the pilot will get the plane to its destination safely? I don't think so.

To me, someone who can code means someone who (unless they're in a detectable state of drunkenness, fatigue, illness, or distraction) will successfully complete a coding task commensurate with some level of experience or, at the very least, explain why exactly the task is proving difficult. While I've seen coding agents do things that truly amaze me, they also make mistakes that no one who "can code" ever makes. If you can't trust an LLM to complete a task anyone who can code will either complete or explain their failure, then it can't code, even if it can (in the sense of "a flipped coin can come up heads") sometimes emit impressive code.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#124

Post by daxfohl »

I want it to generate better code but less of it, and be more proactive about getting human feedback before it starts going off the rails. This sounds like an inexorable push in the opposite direction.

I can see this approach being useful once the foundation is more robust, has better common sense, knows when to push back when requirements conflict or are underspecified. But with current models I can only see this approach as exacerbating the problem; coding agents solution is almost always "more code", not less. Makes for a nice demo, but I can't imagine this would build anything that wouldn't have huge operational problems and 10x-100x more code than necessary.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#126

Post by fragmede »

nonethewiser wrote: post #86
fragmede wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm saying if it's that bad, then it's pure procrastination

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#127

Post by jdxcode »

seff wrote: post #109
withinboredom wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t use git-flow. Every time I see it, it looks like an over-engineer’s wet dream.

Can you say more as to why? The concept is not complex and in our situation at least provides a lot of benefits.

I think the guy that created it has even stated he thinks it's a bad idea

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#128

Post by fragmede »

thevinter wrote: post #88
fragmede wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh. Surely you know this forum didn't exist pre-ChatGPT. Everything in the archives was generated so it just looks that way.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#129

Post by serial_dev »

KaiserPro wrote: post #110
serial_dev wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> people will review your code, I mean you'd think. But it depends on the motivations. At meta, we had league tables for reviewing code. Even then people only really looked at it if a) they were a nitpicking shit b) don't like you and wanted piss on your chips c) its another team trying to fix our shit. With the internal claude rollout and the drive to vibe code all the things, I'm not sure that situation has got any…

Well, it certainly depends on the culture of the team and organization.

Where you have shared ownership, meaning once I approved your PR, I am just as responsible of something goes wrong as you are and I can be expected to understand it just as well as you do… your code will get reviewed.

If shipping is the number one priority of the team, and a team is really just a group of individuals working to meet their quota, and everyone wants to simply ship their stuff, managers pressure managers to constantly put pressure on the devs, you’ll get your PR rubber stamped after 20s of review. Why would I spend hours trying to understand what you did if I could work on my stuff.

And yes, these tools make this 100x worse, people don’t understand their fixes, code standards are no longer relevant, and you are expected to ship 10x faster, so it’s all just slop from here on.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#130

Post by [deleted] »

samsolomon wrote: post #81
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…

[deleted]
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