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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?

#11

Post by politelemon »

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 are not keeping up with modern tools] and you’re one of the best engineers I know!’”

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

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

#13

Post by tbrownaw »

Sometimes I tell the AI to change something, sometimes I just do it myself. Sometimes I start to do it and then the magic tab-complete guesses well enough that I can just tab through the rest of it.

Sometimes the magic tab-complete insists on something silly and repeatedly gets in the way.

Sometimes I tell the AI to do something, and then have to back out the whole thing and do it right myself. Sometimes it's only a little wrong, and I can accept the result and then tweak it a bit. Sometimes it's a little wrong in a way that's easy to tell it to fix.

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

#14

Post by tbrownaw »

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.

That sounds like an excellent match for containers.

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

#15

Post by lubujackson »

I think Yegge needs to keep up with the tech a bit more. Cursor has gotten quite powerful - it's plan mode now seems about on par with Claude Code, producing Mermaid charts and detailed multi-phase plans that pretty much just work. I also noticed their debug mode will now come up with several thesises (thesi?), create some sort of debugging harness and logging system, test each thesis, tear down the debugging logic and present a solution. I have no idea when that happened, but it helped solve a tricky frontend race condition for me a day or two ago.

I still like Claude, but man does it suck down tokens.

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

#16

Post by dolebirchwood »

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.

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

#17

Post by neumann »

petesergeant wrote: post #10

"Claude writes, Codex reviews" has shown huge promise as a pattern for me, so I wrote a Dockerfile and some instructions on how to make that happen for agents, and ended up with https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode I am spending most of my day in this harness. It has rough edges for sure, but it means I trust the code coming out much more than I did just Claude.

I tried to opposite because claude was not coding as well as codex some additional modules for my codebase and codex could. Then I tried to get claude to read and critique and it got so many fundamentals wrong I was wondering if I am using the wrong model.

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

#18

Post by joshuaisaact »

petesergeant wrote: post #10

"Claude writes, Codex reviews" has shown huge promise as a pattern for me, so I wrote a Dockerfile and some instructions on how to make that happen for agents, and ended up with https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode I am spending most of my day in this harness. It has rough edges for sure, but it means I trust the code coming out much more than I did just Claude.

I don't think you need two separate models for this - I get similarly good results re-prompting with Claude. Well, not re-prompting, I just have a skill that wipes the context then gets Claude to review the current PR and make improvements before I review it.

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

#19

Post by _sinelaw_ »

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 maturity I'm much more concerned about keeping it stable and correct, which is hard to do with parallel agents running amok.

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

#20

Post by mlaretallack »

Not the best way to do it, but I use xfce, multiple workspaces, each with there own version of AWS Kiro, and each kiro has its own project I am working on. This allows me to "switch context" easier between each project to check how the agents are getting on. Kiro also notifies me when an agent wants somthing. Usually I keep it to about 4 projects at a time, just to keep the context switching down.
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