Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, though even then I kind of wonder what's the point. Once they build an AI that's as good as a human coder but 1000x faster, parallelization no longer buys you anything. Writing and deploying the code is no longer the bottleneck, so the extra coordination required for parallelism seems like extra cost and risk with no practical benefit.
It’s more about context management, not speed
Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
201–210 of 351 posts
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#202I'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.
I personally don't want to trawl through Twitter to find the current state-of-the-art, so I read Zvi Mowshowitz's newsletter: https://thezvi.substack.com/ His newsletter put me onto using Opus 4.5 exclusively on Dec 1, a little over a week after it was released. That's pretty good for a few minutes of reading a week.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#203I'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me. The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code. Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so…
> The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. That's what you're missing -- the key point is, you don't review and comprehend the output! Instead, you run the program and then issue prompts like this (example from simonw): "fix in and get it to compile" [0]. And I'm not ragging on this at all, thi…
I feel like software engineers are taking a lot of license with the idea that if something bad happens, they will just be able to say "oh the AI did it" and no personal responsibility or liability will attribute. But if they personally looked at the code and their name is underneath it signing off the merge request acknowledging responsibility for it - we have a very different dynamic.
Just like artists have to re-conceptualise the value of what they do around the creative part of the process, software engineers have to rethink what their value proposition is. And I'm seeing a large part of it is, you are going to take responsibility for the AI output. It won't surprise me if after the first few disasters happen, we see liability legislation that mandates human responsibility for AI errors. At that point I feel many of the people all in on agent driven workflows that are explicitly designed to minimise human oversight are going to find themselves with a big problem.
My personal approach is I'm building up a tool set that maximises productivity while ensuring human oversight. Not just that it occurs and is easy to do, but that documentation of it is recorded (inherently, in git).
It will be interesting to see how this all evolves.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I guess "agentic swarms" are the next evolution of the meta-game, the perfect nerd-sniping strategy. Now you can spend all your time minmaxing your team, balancing strengths/weaknesses by tweaking subagents, adding more verifiers and project managers. Maybe there's some psychological draw, that people can feel like gods and have a taste of the power execs feel, even though that power is ultimately a simulacra as well.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#205Ok 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…
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this satire?
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…
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#208Ok 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…
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#209I'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me. The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code. Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so…
Yes, this actually works. In 2026, software engineering is going to change a great deal as a result, and if you're not at least experimenting with this stuff to learn what it's capable of, that's a red flag for your career prospects. I don't mean this in a disparaging way. But we're at a car-meets-horse-and-buggy moment and it's happening really quickly. We all need to at least try driving a car and maybe park the ho…
Attitudes like that, where you believe that the richeous AI pushers will be saved from the coming rapture meanwhile everyone else will be out on the streets, really make people hate the AI crowd
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#210Earlier 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