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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?

#51

Post by ryandvm »

Yegge is smart guy but, I get the impression that he mostly works real hard to not work too hard. And while I'm sympathetic towards that tendency, I feel like most of the advice in this space is about using multi-agent configurations to effectively convince your management and co-workers that you're massively productive. Whether the mountains of code and architecture your agents are crapping out is actually adding value to the organization is a question that most companies are ill-equipped to evaluate - so these agent swarms are just a way to keep the gravy train rolling.

I think I'd rather hear what somebody who is pathologically productive like John Carmack is doing with multi-agent environments...

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

#52

Post by Glyptodon »

tbrownaw wrote: post #14
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.

Completely agree. We need to get the DB into a container, which is somewhat easier said than done for a long-lived project that didn't do it initially.

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

#53

Post by burnerToBetOut » 

    > …The final level in his AI
    > Coding chart reads: "Level 8:
    > you build your own orchestrator
    > to coordinate more agents"…
Yegge revealed [1] what's necessary to get to that level…

____

…How do you avoid getting tired? Dude, I take naps throughout the day. I'm exhausted…

…

…which is why I mentioned in one of my last blog posts that I'm taking naps all the time…

____

Yegge's productivity sounds impressive. I'll give you that. But it doesn't sound practical or sustainable for the everyday dev.

I doubt that even Google — with all its famous perks — offers employees ad hoc nap times while they're on the clock.

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/Napster2026

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

#54

Post by 0xecro1 »

I use it for both — side projects and my day job in embedded systems.

The key is where the tokens go. More tokens spent on planning, design, spec validation, test generation, and multi-agent review than on writing the actual code. The review pipeline should be heavier than the generation pipeline.

I encourage my team to use it as a plugin too. The "sorry way" is still a fine starting point — but once you see what a structured agent pipeline catches that manual review misses, it's hard to go back.

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

#55

Post by kyleee »

avaer wrote: post #29

I think people who run 15 agents to write a piece of software could probably use 1 or 2 and a better multi-page prompt and have the same results for a fraction of the cost. Especially with the latest models which pack quite a long and meaningful horizon into a single session, if you prompt diligently for what exactly you want it to do. Modern agentic coding spins up its own sub-agents when it makes sense to paralleli…

Do the widely held truths of the mythical man month book hold in a universe of well prompted agents?

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

#56

Post by jovanaccount »

Why it works: It validates their pain ("herding cats") and offers a specific, technical fix (concurrency control) rather than a vague "AI solution."

The "managing the herd" overhead is real. I found that 80% of my debugging time wasn't fixing bad code, but fixing race conditions where agents were overwriting each other's context or hallucinating because they didn't have the latest state.

I ended up building a "traffic light" protocol (essentially a semaphore for swarms) just to force serialization on critical tasks. It kills the speed slightly but stops the "death spiral" where one agent's error cascades through the herd.

If you're building your own orchestrator or using something like OpenClaw, I open-sourced the concurrency logic here: https://github.com/jovanSAPFIONEER/Network-AI

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

#58

Post by KB »

hrishikesh-s wrote: post #36

Yes, I'm using an agent orchestrator to write code. In fact, a couple of days before Anthropic introduced agent teams, I built a custom tool for myself inside emacs: https://github.com/hrishikeshs/magnus I basically cycle through prompts and approve/deny/guide agents while looking at the buffer and thinking traces as text scrolls through. It has changed my life :)

Have you considered integrating with worktrees via Magit to have multiple agents working across different changesets of a repo?

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

#59

Post by softwaredoug »

This mode of operating seems fairly alien to me.

It’s like a big waterfall design. It’s rare you have all the requirements of an app known up front. It’s pretty rare that they’re known so well you could heads down code non stop and have some result matching a spec.

Usually the coding is iterative and collaborative with other people. You ship something to a customer/colleague. You discuss “is this right!?” You evolve accordingly. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect coding agent writing 100% of the code - active discovery of what to build IS the job.

Where fully autonomous coding makes sense is when you don’t care and most defaults are fine. In this case you’re working aggressively top down on a problem. Start with the default rails app version of your app, fine tune in small steps what’s custom.

Or your task is heavily verifiable a priori, like a C compiler. Or translating a parser with great tests from language A to B

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

#60

Post by hrishikesh-s »

KB wrote: post #58
hrishikesh-s wrote: post #36

Yes, I'm using an agent orchestrator to write code. In fact, a couple of days before Anthropic introduced agent teams, I built a custom tool for myself inside emacs: https://github.com/hrishikeshs/magnus I basically cycle through prompts and approve/deny/guide agents while looking at the buffer and thinking traces as text scrolls through. It has changed my life :)

Have you considered integrating with worktrees via Magit to have multiple agents working across different changesets of a repo?

Haven't really spent time working with more than 2-3 agents at a time. I quickly become the bottleneck when I review the diffs/plans and can't really context switch that much during development. The sweet-spot is 2-3 agents co-ordinating at a time and me overseeing everything
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