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Agent swarms and the new model economics

cursor.com

111–120 of 159 posts

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and it's still a cli tool running on JS So it's not a brag They could just write in Rust directly can't they? If they do that then they're doing what they preach

My app is written in TypeScript. With agents I could rewrite it in Rust, I just don’t need to so I don’t. It doesn’t warrant that level of performance and the business logic is more digestible in its current form. Given the amount of reviewing I need to do now, readability is worth more than performance. There are always tradeoffs. Are you implying that them attempting a Rust rewrite would fail, and this is why they’…

Anthropic was saying that you don't need to review the code anymore.

If that was the case, it just makes no sense at all to use JS. Take the free performance gain and don't read the code.

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#112
post #18
post #12

I would have loved to see more of the harness engineering shared as code. Instead we are left with only the outcome. I guess that makes sense since the harness is the product in the case of Cursor.

I call this junk "meta-agentic engineering", it reminds me of people who have the coolest nvim configs, spend hundreds of hours customizing it but ultimately get less work done than the guy with minimal workflows, if any at all. I look on twitter and it's just people building tools for agents to use agents, some weird customization loop going on in the LLM space right now. Ultimately these are trends pushed on us fro…

I think many of us engineers (including myself) are suffering from AI-induced procrastination. Fixing that pesky bug in production isn't fun. Building a harness/workflow that detects and fixes pesky bugs in production on its own is way more fun (especially when your employer pays for tokens), and it feels just as important, if not more! So what if it didn't actually fix that pesky bug in production on its own...

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#113
post #95

I initially thought that getting agents to work for longer and in large groups was the future, but I'm increasingly thinking that, at least for engineering, just one thread makes more sense. The agent pulls things into context as needed. One thing that I've been experimenting with is also letting the agent remove things from context, such as files. But just adding to the context and compacting when it's full seems li…

Have you used this method yourself for long workflows and with contexts approaching 1 million tokens? It doesn't work very well. LLM context is nearly half unusable.

I've found that model performance starts substantially degrading after 10%.

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#114
post #90
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often think of tech/business as bottleneck issues ie whats my limiting factor. That's relevant to pre-ai business as humans are relatively self organizing. The issue with AI is it has no real memory, context, long term reasoning, etc. These are a lot of what we use to determine how well we're doing something as well as why. The "bottleneck" so to speak with ai is that it will just circularly build junk forever…

But that's mostly just vanilla models. Some critical parts of agentic development are literally months old while most mature ones are merely a couple years old. Critical thinking was the most critical checkpoint for models to reach. Now its only a matter of time for the right tooling and orchestration to come along. Once agent memory and recall works well, all of those bottlenecks will go away one by one.

[dead]

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#115
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My app is written in TypeScript. With agents I could rewrite it in Rust, I just don’t need to so I don’t. It doesn’t warrant that level of performance and the business logic is more digestible in its current form. Given the amount of reviewing I need to do now, readability is worth more than performance. There are always tradeoffs. Are you implying that them attempting a Rust rewrite would fail, and this is why they’…

Anthropic was saying that you don't need to review the code anymore. If that was the case, it just makes no sense at all to use JS. Take the free performance gain and don't read the code.

Yep they can just prompt Fable or Mythos!

Here is the prompt they can use:

Claude, migrate Claude Code into Rust. Make no mistakes!

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#117
post #81
post #53

This is almost a year behind Steve Yegge's first post on beads. Gas Town and Gas City provide orchestration for the swarm. So far I haven't seen a perfect implementation but this idea isn't new.

Everything Steve yegge has done has been trash. That's why nobody is talking about beads or gas town. It was clear even in the beginning that it was a borderline AI-psychosis-fueled trash fire.

At the same time a lot of the stuff in this Cursor post sounds like things that Gastown was doing, albeit more sober and thought through

Re: Agent swarms and the new model economics

#120
post #18
post #12

I would have loved to see more of the harness engineering shared as code. Instead we are left with only the outcome. I guess that makes sense since the harness is the product in the case of Cursor.

I call this junk "meta-agentic engineering", it reminds me of people who have the coolest nvim configs, spend hundreds of hours customizing it but ultimately get less work done than the guy with minimal workflows, if any at all. I look on twitter and it's just people building tools for agents to use agents, some weird customization loop going on in the LLM space right now. Ultimately these are trends pushed on us fro…

I never liked the term "ricing" with window managers, but this is definitely veering into LLM ricing territory sometimes. And people are getting rich off of it.
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