No mention of what was actually built?
Also, I have no desire to micromanage a bunch of robots. I rather build things.
I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#12Editing notes on the content - the content of this blog post is clearly AI-enhanced (emdash) which is ok but the tone is not. It's super flowery and oversold - example "It was a shift from a single laser to a powerful floodlight."
> this wasn't just X, it was Y
I'm not even going to bother reading the rest. Just give me the bullet points you fed the LLM at that point
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#13> And, to be clear, when I say production ready I mean it had good test coverage, CI/CD, includes auth, background jobs, and integrates LLMs and other 3rd party APIs. I’d consider it a respectable alpha version of the product.
So does any template off GitHub?
When you run the Laravel Installer, you got pretty much all of these for free (sans LLM) And within a normal work week, you can have a valid prototype with an admin panel (Laravel Nova), and a lot of stuff that the laravel ecosystem provides. The issue is not coding those stuff (they've already been coded for you). The issue is to know what exactly do you want that is not part of some templates, the actual business value of the software.
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#14There's a lot of disagreement about what "agent" means. As far as I can tell it is the same as AI chat, but with a really long response time.
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#15What did you use to write the blog post?
I think it's ChatGPT (the headings have a particular tone, the lists, etc.; maybe 4o?) but with a good starting point and some manual editing. I normally find it pretty hard to get through AI-written content but this was for the most part inoffensive to my tastes (though still pretty rough at points).
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#16Hey HN, author here. I spent last week in a deep-dive experiment to see how far I could push modern agentic workflows on a greenfield project. I wanted to move past simple code generation and see if I could build a system where I was orchestrating a team of agents to build a full application. The results were pretty wild (~800 commits, 100+ PRs, and a functioning app we use internally at my company), but the most int…
$6K/week is a senior engineer's salary. How long would it have taken a crack coder to do the work?
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#17Hey HN, author here. I spent last week in a deep-dive experiment to see how far I could push modern agentic workflows on a greenfield project. I wanted to move past simple code generation and see if I could build a system where I was orchestrating a team of agents to build a full application. The results were pretty wild (~800 commits, 100+ PRs, and a functioning app we use internally at my company), but the most int…
Ask yourself what happens when Claude releases Claude Code 2.0, which just uses AI to self-manage the swarms from a simpler prompt.
You would do the same thing with less work. Progress! If only, though; I find it easy to stump even the best model on brownfield code bases.
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#18It's funny how things have evolved. The modern tech stack is so inefficient at providing solutions that people grab and hold on to code gen as some kind of magic machine. We have gone from pragmatic, fast and stable foundation systems that could be extended by some small snippets of code (Drupal), RAD systems (Delphi, Visual Basic) where you could drop some components and some lines of code on a form to create functionality to some of the most verbose and ugly things that have ever reared its head (React, Angular, home-made REST systems - instead of SOAP). Less code is better. The code generated today using vibe coding won't be looked back upon. It's like fast fashion. Throw it in the trash.
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#19This tracks my experience, though I haven't gone into the "swarm" approach. One thing I don't think gets enough discussion is:
> The cognitive load of this new state was immense. After about three hours of intense orchestration, I would feel completely burnt.
I definitely feel that. It's like the job becomes solely architecting the system (not terrible) but you still need to hold the entire program in your head (deeply taxing) while it is updated by a 1,000 tiny cuts which can dislodge your mental model... and then you are screwed. It is important center yourself from time to time and ensure you are on solid ground. The best way to do that is to give things a minute to sink in. Unless I am boilerplating everything, I don't WANT to go faster.
In general, I don't have a lot of desire to go down this orchestrator path. Maybe once tooling and things settle down a bit it can be helpful at times, but usually I get more value from letting things breathe, especially if there are structural changes or new ideas that bubble up and need to be considered.
Before LLMs, I would never re-architect on the fly, but I am more willing to make structural changes mid-flight now because it is so costless. Things I used to architect "good enough" (with a plan to revise in 12 months now) can be done precisely right the first time after going halfway down a path then noodling on it for an a day or so.
This is "Not the Way to Architect," but it sure is an effective way to go from idea -> complete.
Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents
#20Editing notes on the content - the content of this blog post is clearly AI-enhanced (emdash) which is ok but the tone is not. It's super flowery and oversold - example "It was a shift from a single laser to a powerful floodlight."
> this wasn't just X, it was Y I'm not even going to bother reading the rest. Just give me the bullet points you fed the LLM at that point
My process is to dictate and word vomit all of my thoughts to AI (in this case Gemini 2.5 Pro) and then refine from there. I know there's some amount of "smells like AI" in the writing, but at this point I don't think it takes away from the lessons shared.
That said, maybe it's worth it to modify things so there is less "AI sounding" verbiage. Don't want folks to write it off as "AI Slop" because of certain phrases. TBD!