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Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

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Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#211

Post by mudkipdev »

birken wrote: post #75

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

Just pick your favorite one and stick with it. There is no point in keeping up, since we're in an endless cycle of hype where is one ranked higher than the other, with them eventually catching up to each other

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#212

Post by Jimmc414 »

nobody_r_knows wrote: post #207
mafriese wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope it isn’t. I did it as a joke initially (I also had a version where every 2 stories there was a meeting and if a someone underperformed it would get fired). I think there are multiple reasons why it actually works so well: - I built a system where context (+ the current state + goal) is properly structured and coding agents only get the information they actually need and nothing more. You wouldn’t let your produc…

I'm confused when you say you have a manager, scrum master, archetech, all supposdely sharing the same memory, do each of those "employees" "know" what they are? And if so, based on what are their identities defined? Prompts? Or something more. Or am I just too dumb to understand / swimming against the current here. Either way, it sounds amazing!

Their roles are defined by prompts. Only memory are shared files and the conversation history that’s looped back to stateless API calls to an LLM.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#214

Post by adastra22 »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #146
adastra22 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude Code has been inherently limited to conversations How so? I’ve been using “claude -p” for a while now. But even within an interactive session, an agent call out is non-interactive. It operates entirely autonomously, and then reports back the end result to the top level agent.

Because of OAuth. If they gave people API keys then no-one buys their ludicrously priced API product (I assume their strategy is to subsidise their consumer product with the business product). You can use Claude Code SDK but it requires a token from Claude Code. If you use this token anywhere else, your account gets shut down. Claude -p still hits Claude Code with all the tools, all the Claude Code wrapping.

That’s not what this subthread is about. They’re talking about the subagent within Claude Code itself.

Btw, you can use the Claude Agent SDK (the renamed Claude Code SDK) with a subscription. I can tell you it works out of the box, and AFAIK it is not a ToS violation.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#215

Post by mogili1 »

kaspermarstal wrote: post #205
mafriese wrote: post #138

Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees. Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes u…

Can you share technical details please? How is this implemented? Is it pure prompt-based, plugins, or do you have like script that repeatedly calls the agents? Where does the kanban live?

Not the OP, but this is how I manage my coding agent loops:

I built a drag and drop UI tool that sets up a sequence of agent steps (Claude code or codex) and have created different workflows based on the task. I'll kick them off and monitor.

Here's the tool I built for myself for this: https://github.com/smogili1/circuit

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#216

Post by ggregoryarms »

jitl wrote: post #210
blibble wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, nfts, metaverse, all great advances same people pushing this crap

ai is actually useful tho. idk about this level of abstraction but the more basic delegation to one little guy in the terminal gives me a lot of extra time

Maybe that's because you're not using your time well in the first place

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#218

Post by blibble »

ionwake wrote: post #213
blibble wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bro wanna buy some monkey jpegs? 100% genuine

[flagged]

> Laughing about them instead of creating intergenerational wealth for a few bucks?

it's not creating wealth, it's scamming the gullible

criminality being lucrative is not a new phenomenon

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#219

Post by SkyPuncher »

ggoo wrote: post #145
mafriese wrote: post #138

Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees. Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes u…

Is this satire?

Doubt it. I use a similar setup from time to time.

You need to have different skills at different times. This type of setup helps break those skills out.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#220

Post by esperent »

neom wrote: post #29
jswny wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just spawning multiple parallel explore agents instructed to look at different things, and then compiling results That’s a pretty basic functionality in Claude code

Sounds like I should probably switch to claude code cli. Thanks for the info. :)

I added tests to an old project a few days ago. I spent a while to carefully spec everything out, and there was a lot of tedious work. Aiming for 70% coverage meant that a few thousand unit tests were needed.

I wrote up a technical plan with Claude code and I was about to set it to work when I thought, hang on, this would be very easy to split into separate work, let's try this subagent thing.

So I asked Claude to split it up into non- overlapping pieces and send out as many agents as it could to work on each piece.

I expected 3 or 4. It sent out 26 subagents. Drudge work that I estimate would have optimistically taken me several months was done in about 20 minutes. Crazy.

Of course it still did take me a couple of days to go through everything and feel confident that the tests were doing their job properly. Asking Claude to review separate sections carefully helped a lot there too. I'm pretty confident that the tests I ended up with were as good as what I would have written.

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