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Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

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Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#191

Post by ukuina »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #153
vidarh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress. It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't…

Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different. It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot promptin…

It's natural to assume that subagents will scale to the next level of abstraction; as you mentioned, they do not.

The unlock here is tmux-based session management for the teammates, with two-way communication using agent inbox. It works very well.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#192

Post by zmmmmm »

idontwantthis wrote: post #70
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…

I just can’t get with this. There is so much beyond “works” in software. There are requirements that you didn’t know about and breaking scenarios that you didn’t plan for and if you don’t know how the code works, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Assuming an AI could fix any problem given a good enough prompt, I can’t write that prompt without sufficient knowledge and experience in the codebase. I’m not saying t…

Yes this is one of my concerns.

Usually about 50% of my understanding of the domain comes from the process of building the code. I can see a scenario where large scale automated code works for a while but then quickly becomes unsupportable because the domain expertise isn't there to drive it. People are currently working off their pre-existing domain knowledge which is what allows them to rapidly and accurately express in a few sentences what an AI should do and then give decisive feedback to it.

The best counter argument is that AIs can explain the existing code and domain almost as well as they can code it to begin with. So there is a reasonable prospect that the whole system can sustain itself. However there is no arguing to me that isn't a huge experiment. Any company that is producing enormous amounts of code that nobody understands is well out over their skis and could easily find themselves a year or two down the track with huge issues.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#193

Post by ionwake »

blibble wrote: post #180
ionwake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean no offence to anyone but whenever new tech progresses rapidly it usually catches most unaware, who tend to ridicule or feel the concepts are sourced from it.

yeah, nfts, metaverse, all great advances same people pushing this crap

bro im using ai swarms, have you even tried them?

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#194

Post by throwup238 »

overfeed wrote: post #176
mafriese wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope it isn’t. I did it as a joke initially (I also had a version where every 2 stories there was a meeting and if a someone underperformed it would get fired). I think there are multiple reasons why it actually works so well: - I built a system where context (+ the current state + goal) is properly structured and coding agents only get the information they actually need and nothing more. You wouldn’t let your produc…

> [...]coding agents only get the information they actually need and nothing more Extrapolating from this concept led me to a hot-take I haven't had time to blog about: Agentic AI will revive the popularity of microservices. Mostly due to the deleterious effect of context size on agent performance.

Why would they revive the popularity of microservices? They can just as well be used to enforce strict module boundaries within a modular monolith keeping the codebase coherent without splitting off microservices.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#195

Post by zmmmmm »

chasing wrote: post #150
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…

Yeah, it's not just my job to generate the code: It's my job to know the code. I can't let code out into the wild that I'm not 100% willing to vouch for.

At a higher level, it goes beyond that. It's my job to take responsibility for code. At some fundamental level that puts a limit on how productive AI can be. Because we can only produce code as fast as responsibility takers can execute whatever processes they need to do to ensure sufficient due diligence is executed. In a lot of jurisdictions, human-in-loop line by line review is being mandated for code developed in regulatory settings. That pretty much caps the output at the rate of human review, which is to be honest, not drastically higher than coding itself anyway (Often I might invest 30% of the time to review a change as the developer took to do it).

It means there is no value in producing more code. Only value in producing better, clearer, safer code that can be reasoned about by humans. Which in turn makes me very sceptical about agents other than as a useful parallelisation mechanism akin to multiple developers working on separate features. But in terms of ramping up the level of automation - it's frankly kind of boring to me because if anything it make the review part harder which actually slows us down.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#196

Post by vidarh »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #153
vidarh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress. It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't…

Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different. It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot promptin…

> Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting.

You ask if I've tried to do this, and then set constraints that are completely different to what I described.

I have done what I described. Several times for different projects. I have a setup like that running right now in a different window.

> It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works.

It is how Claude Code works when you give it a number of sub-agents with rules for how to manage files that effectively works like task queues, or skills/mcp servers to interact with communications tools.

> it is not easy

It is not easy to do in a generic way that works without tweaks for every project and every user. It is reasonably easy to do for specific teams where you can adjust it to the desired workflows.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#197

Post by anhner »

ramoz wrote: post #101
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.

When all of industry is trying to catch up with the features of one coding agent - it may be a signal to just use that one.

Sure, let's all ditch linux and macOS as well since they're not the most popular...

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#198

Post by thaynt »

ggoo wrote: post #145
mafriese wrote: post #138

Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees. Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes u…

Is this satire?

I think many people really like the gamification and complex role playing. That is how GitHub got popular, that is how Rube Goldberg agent/swarm/cult setups get popular.

It attracts the gamers and LARPers. Unfortunately, management is on their side until they find out after four years or so that it is all a scam.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#199

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

mtalantikite wrote: post #175
daxfohl wrote: post #124

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 ap…

Agreed, I'm constantly coming back to a Claude tmux pane just to see it's decided to do something completely ridiculous. Just the other day I was having it add some test coverage stats to CI runs and when I came back it was basically trying to reinvent Istanbul in a bash script because the nyc tool wasn't installed in CI. I had to interrupt it and say "uh, just install nyc?". I was "Absolutely right!".

If only Rome could be built in a day..
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