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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

141–150 of 532 posts

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#141
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the same way. At first I was splitting off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, then I realized I just can't keep up with it all, running few agents around one issue in one directory is fast enough. Way faster than before and I can still follow what's happening.

> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.

My old work machine used power quite aggressively - I was happy to pay for that (and turn it off at night!). This seems even more directly valuable.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#143
post #50

Wasn't the best practice to run one model/coding agent that writes the code and another one that reviews it? E.g. Claude Code for writing the code, GPT Codex to review/critique it? Different reward functions.

I think people are misunderstanding reward functions and LLMs. LLMs don't actually have a reward system like some other ML models.

They are trained with one, and when you look at DPO you can say they contain an implicit one as well.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#144
post #83

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? I think people are now just using agents for the sake of it. I'm perfectly happy running two simple agents, one for writing and one for reviewing. I don't need to go be writing code at faster than light speed. Just focusing on the spec, and watching the agent as it does its work and intervening when it goes sideways is perfectly fine with me. I'm doing 5-7x productivity easily,…

Yes I'm still not really understanding this "run agents overnight" thing. Most of the time if I use claude it's done in 5-20 minutes. I've never wanted to have work done for me overnight...tomorrow is already plenty of time for more work, it's not going anywhere, and my employer isn't paying me to produce overnight.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#145
post #51
post #30

I guess to reach this point you have already decided you don't care what the code looks like. Something I'm starting to struggle with is when agents can now do longer and more complex tasks, how do you review all the code? Last week I did about 4 weeks of work over 2 days first with long running agents working against plans and checklists, then smaller task clean ups, bugfixes and refactors. But all this code needs t…

So you have become a reviewer instead of a programmer? Is that so? hones question. And if so, what is the advantage of looking a code for 12 hours instead of coding for 12.

Build features faster. Granted, this exposes the difference between people who like to finish projects and people who like to get paid a lot of money for typing on a keyboard.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#147
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope - though I’ll take it as a compliment either way. It’s a problem I’ve been sitting with for a while, so the answer came out more formed than I expected. You disagree?

Its actually a pretty good idea/framework for writing commit descriptions, especially for smaller changes that don't have any nuances to note in the commit

Why only small changes tho? I think it can also work with larger changes if you commit more regularly. And with agentic coding or even with autonomous agentic coding, you need to do it regularly and create these contextual checkpoints, no?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#148

[flagged]

Exactly. That’s why I’m skeptical about long running agent loops too.

The thing is, LLMs are probabilistic data structures, and the probability of incorrect final output is proportional to both amount of turns made and amount of agents run simultaneously. In practice it means you almost never end up with desired result after a long loop.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#149

You can always tell claude to use red-green-refactor and that really is a step-up from "yeah don't forget to write tests and make sure they pass" at the end of the prompt, sure. But even better, tell it to create subagents to form red team, green team and refactor team while the main instance coordinates them, respecting the clean-room rules. It really works. The trick is just not mixing/sharing the context. Differen…

I've been able to encode Outside-in Test Driven Development into a repeatable workflow. Claude Code follows it to a T, and I've gotten great results. I've written about it more here, and created a repo people can use out of the box to try it out:

https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-softwa... https://github.com/JoeGaebel/outside-in-tdd-starter

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#150
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is, with the setup I mentioned, you change the rewards. The concept is: Red Team (Test Writers), write tests without seeing implementation. They define what the code should do based on specs/requirements only. Rewarded by test failures. A new test that passes immediately is suspicious as it means either the implementation already covers it (diminishing returns) or the test is tautological. Red's ideal outco…

You guys are describing wonderful things, but I've yet to see any implementation. I tried coding my own agents, yet the results were disappointing. What kind of setup do you use ? Can you share ? How much does it cost ?

If you are not spending 5-10k dollars a month for interesting projects, you likely won't see interesting results
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