Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

code.claude.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 238 posts

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#101

Post by CuriouslyC »

ttoinou wrote: post #79
bonesss wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare both approaches to mature actor frameworks and they don’t seem to be breaking much ice. These kinds of supervisor trees and hierarchies aren’t new for actor based systems and they’re obvious applications of LLM agents working in concert. The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI have been going on this long without such orchestration, considering the unavoidable issues of context windows and unreliable self-validati…

If it was so obvious and easy, why didn't we have this a year ago ? Models were mature enough back then to make this work

Orchestration definitely wasn't possible a year ago, the only tool that even produced decent results that far back was Aider, it wasn't fully agentic, and it didn't really shine until Gemini 2.5 03-25.

The truth is that people are doing experiments on most of this stuff, and a lot of them are even writing about it, but most of the time you don't see that writing (or the projects that get made) unless someone with an audience already (like Steve Yegge) makes it.

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#102

Post by vonneumannstan »

ottah wrote: post #47
BonoboIO wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely have to create some sort of PLAN.md and PROGRESS.md via a command and an implement command that delegates work. That is the only way that I can get bigger things done no matter how „good“ their task feature is. You run out of context so quickly and if you don’t have some kind of persistent guidance things go south

It's not sufficient, especially if I am not learning about the problem by being part of the implementation process. The models are still very weak reasoners, writing code faster doesn't accelerate my understanding of the code the model wrote. Even with clear specs I am constantly fighting with it duplicating methods, writing ineffective tests, or implementing unnecessarily complex solutions. AI just isn't a better en…

>AI just isn't a better engineer than me, and that makes it a weak development partner.

This would also be true of Junior Engineers. Do you find them impossible to work with as well?

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#103

Post by findjashua »

ottah wrote: post #32

I absolutely cannot trust Claude code to independently work on large tasks. Maybe other people work on software that's not significantly complex, but for me to maintain code quality I need to guide more of the design process. Teams of agents just sounds like adding a lot more review and refactoring that can just be avoided by going slower and thinking carefully about the problem.

you need a reviewer agent for every step of the process - review the plan generated by the planner, the update made by the task worker subagent, and a final reviewer once all tasks are done.

this does eat up tokens _very_ quickly though :(

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#104

Post by CuriouslyC »

isoprophlex wrote: post #62
pronik wrote: post #58

To the folks comparing this to GasTown: keep in mind that Steve Yegge explicitely pitched agent orchestrators to among others Anthropic months ago: > I went to senior folks at companies like Temporal and Anthropic, telling them they should build an agent orchestrator, that Claude Code is just a building block, and it’s going to be all about AI workflows and “Kubernetes for agents”. I went up onstage at multiple event…

There seems to be a lot of convergent evolution happening in the space. Days before the gas town hype hit, I made a (less baroque, less manic) "agent team" setup: a shell script to kick off a ralph wiggum loop, and CLAUDE-MESSAGE-BUS.md for inter-ralph communication (Thread safety was hacked into this with a .claude.lock file). The main claude instance is instructed to launch as many ralph loops as it wants, in scree…

Not a you thing. Fancy orchestration is mostly a waste, validation is the bottleneck. You can do E2E tests and all sorts of analytic guardrails but you need to make sure the functionality matches intent rather than just being "functional" which is still a slow analog process.

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#105

Post by digdugdirk »

doctoboggan wrote: post #99
tclancy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this not use up tokens incredibly fast though? I have a Pro subscription and bang up against the limits pretty regularly.

It _does_ use up tokens incredibly fast, which is probably why Anthropic is developing this feature. This is mostly for corporations using the API, not individuals on a plan.

I'd love to see a breakdown of the token consumption of inaccurate/errored/unused task branches for claude code and codex. It seems like a great revenue source for the model providers.

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#106

Post by sciencejerk »

cstrahan wrote: post #61
IhateAI wrote: post #6

[flagged]

> Any self respecting engineer should recognize that these tools and models only serve to lower the value of your labor. Depends on what the aim of your labor is. Is it typing on a keyboard, memorizing (or looking up) whether that function was verb_noun() or noun_verb(), etc? Then, yeah, these tools will lower your value. If your aim is to get things done, and generate value, then no, I don't think these tools will l…

Your brother's livelihood is not safe from AI, nor is any other livelihood. A small slice of lucky, smart, well-placed, protected individuals will benefit from AI, and I presume many unlucky people with substantial disabilities or living in poverty will benefit as well. Technology seems to continue the improve the outcomes at the very top and very bottom, while sacrificing the biggest group in the middle. Many HN Software Engineers here immensely benefitted from Big Tech over the past 15 years -- they were a part of that lucky privileged group winning 300k+ USD salaries plus equity for a long time. AI has completely disrupted this space and drastically decreased the value of their work, and it largely did this by stealing open source code for training data. These Software Engineers are right to feel upset and threatened and oppose these AI tools, since they are their replacement. I believe that is why you see so much AI hate in HN

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#107

Post by ttoinou »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #101
ttoinou wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was so obvious and easy, why didn't we have this a year ago ? Models were mature enough back then to make this work

Orchestration definitely wasn't possible a year ago, the only tool that even produced decent results that far back was Aider, it wasn't fully agentic, and it didn't really shine until Gemini 2.5 03-25. The truth is that people are doing experiments on most of this stuff, and a lot of them are even writing about it, but most of the time you don't see that writing (or the projects that get made) unless someone with an…

Roo Code in VSCode was working fine a year ago, even back in November 2024 with Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#108

Post by IhateAI_2 »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #29
IhateAI wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, a bunch of NFT people used to say the same thing. lmao, please explain to me why these companies should be valued at 200x revenue.. They are providing autocomplete APIs. How come Google's valuation hasn't increased 100-200x, they provide foundation models + a ton more services as well and are profitable. None of this makes sense, its destined to fail.

I like your name, it suggests you're here for a good debate. Let me start by conceding on the company value front; they should not have such value. I will also concede that these models lower your value of labor and quality of craft. But what they give in return is the ability to scale your engineering impact to new highs - Talented engineers know which implementation patterns work better, how to build debuggable and…

(I had to create a new account, because HN doesn't like LLM haters (don't mess with the bag ig)

the em dashes in your reply scare me, but I'll assume you're a real person lol.

I think your opinion is valid, but tell that to the C Suite who's laid of 400k tech workers in the last 16 months in the USA. These tools don't seem to be used to empower high quality engineering, only to naively increase the bottom line by decreasing the number of engineers, and increasing workloads on those remaining.

Full disclosure, I haven't been laid off ever, but I see what's happening. I think when the trade-off is that your labor is worth a fraction of what it used to be and you're also expected to produce more, then that trade-off isn't worth it.

It would be a lot different if the signaling from business leaders was the reverse. If they believed these tools empowered labor's impact to a business, and planned on rewarding on that, it would be a different story. That's not what we are seeing, and they are very open about their plans for the future of our profession.

Automation can be good overall for society, but you also can't ignore the fact that basically all automation has decreased the value of the labor it replaced or subsidized.

This automation isn't necessarily adding value to society. I don't see any software being built that's increasing the quality of people's life, I don't see research being accelerated. There is no economic data to support this either. The economic gains are only reflected in the values of companies who are selling tokens, or have been able to decrease their employee-counts with token allowances.

All I see is people sharing CRUD apps on twitter, 50 clones of the same SaaS, ,people constantly complaining about how their favorite software/OS has more bugs, the cost of hardware and electricity going up and people literally going into psychosis. (I have a list of 70+ people on twitter that I've been adding too that are literally manic and borderline insane because of these tools).

But hey, at least your favorite AI evangelist from that podcast you loved can afford the $20,000/night resort this summer...

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#109

Post by lossolo »

ttoinou wrote: post #79
bonesss wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare both approaches to mature actor frameworks and they don’t seem to be breaking much ice. These kinds of supervisor trees and hierarchies aren’t new for actor based systems and they’re obvious applications of LLM agents working in concert. The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI have been going on this long without such orchestration, considering the unavoidable issues of context windows and unreliable self-validati…

If it was so obvious and easy, why didn't we have this a year ago ? Models were mature enough back then to make this work

Because gathering training data and doing post-training takes time. I agree with OP that this is the obvious next step given context length limitations. Humans work the same way in organizations, you have different people specializing in different things because everyone has a limited "context length".

Re: Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

#110

Post by IhateAI_2 »

M4R5H4LL wrote: post #35
IhateAI wrote: post #6

[flagged]

From an economic standpoint this is basically machines doing work humans used to do. We’ve already gone through this many times. We built machines that can make stuff orders of magnitude faster than humans, and nobody really argues we should preserve obsolete tools and techniques as a valued human craft. Obviously automation messes with jobs and identity for some people, but historically a large chunk of human labor…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN