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I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

zachwills.net

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Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#21

Post by zachwills »

skydhash wrote: post #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 a…

You're 100% right; there are ways to move quickly without using AI to write the code. I also agree with you that you need to know what you're doing. If you're a total newbie you likely won't get as far using Laravel or something like that vs. a veteran who's been there & done that before.

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#22

Post by zachwills »

zerocharge wrote: post #18

It'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 functi…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I don't agree that code generated by AI will be easily distinguishable from code generated by hand; I think it depends on who is authoring. Also, for what it's worth, if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#23

Post by zachwills »

turtlebits wrote: post #11

No mention of what was actually built? Also, I have no desire to micromanage a bunch of robots. I rather build things.

It's an internal tool we're using at my company. Generally offers automatic insights into work being done. I will share more about it when I can!

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#24

Post by zachwills »

mpeg wrote: post #8

It would be a more interesting blog post if you showed that the app they built is actually production ready. In my experience, letting LLMs work autonomously just produces code slop.

Not being controversial, but I genuinely believe it's user error when it's pure slop. There are too many people delivering real value with it for that not to be the case. I think there is an art to how you prompt, what problems you give it, how you break things down, etc. Also knowing what good looks like and being able to steer it in the right direction. The 20 agents I had running at various times were still taking input from me and I was interjecting when I saw them going off track (which happened!).

Model matters too. Lots of what I did was with Opus. Significantly better than Sonnet.

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#25

Post by zachwills »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10
zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

> The results were pretty wild (~800 commits, 100+ PRs, and a functioning app we use internally at my company) I'd be very interested to hear less about the process, and more about the app itself. If a week "in the hole" resulted in a Slackbot that greets people when they enter a Slack channel, I'd be significantly less impressed than if you'd built, say, a CI pipeline, or something that automatically creates Jira ti…

Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion. It's an internal app with auth, ties to LLMs for analysis, ties to 3rd party data sources for aggregation of data, etc. It's not a Slackbot! It's actually something that we can use instead of paying ~$30k/yr (what we were quoted for similar products by vendors). I'd consider it an alpha release in it's current form.

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#26

Post by zachwills »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6
zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

> I’m convinced the role of an engineer is shifting from a hands-on coder to an architect of these intelligent systems. I think this is what a lot of people do and don't understand. The AI is only as good as your ability to architect the software. I think I'd be okay if someone wrote AI generated code if they hand wrote all unit testing to ensure that the AI isn't producing garbage, I think this is a reasonable trade…

Agreed 100%!

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#27

Post by zachwills »

esafak wrote: post #16
zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey 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?

Good question, potentially they could have done the same. I'm not an IC day-to-day, so this was me getting back in the saddle. I imagine someone who is currently a high-level IC using the approaches I did could have accomplished even more.

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#28

Post by zachwills »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #4

What did you use to write the blog post?

Copy/pasting from another comment:

> 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!

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#29

Post by zachwills »

striking wrote: post #15
doctorpangloss wrote: post #4

What 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).

Copy/paste from another comment: "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!"

Mind sharing which points were pretty rough? I don't want the message to get lost in the "oof this is AI slop" mess, so always interested in what might be hitting folks the wrong way so I can adapt.

Re: I built a production app in a week by managing a swarm of 20 AI agents

#30

Post by zachwills »

risyachka wrote: post #9
zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

So where is the app?

From another comment: "It's an internal app with auth, ties to LLMs for analysis, ties to 3rd party data sources for aggregation of data, etc. It's not a Slackbot! It's actually something that we can use instead of paying ~$30k/yr (what we were quoted for similar products by vendors). I'd consider it an alpha release in it's current form."
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