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Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

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Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy. If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probab…

My understanding is that the main reason splitting up work is effective is context management. For instance, if an agent only has to be concerned with one task, its context can be massively reduced. Further, the next agent can just be told the outcome, it also has reduced context load, because it doesn't need to do the inner workings, just know what the result is. For instance, a security testing agent just needs to…

I’ve found that task isolation, rather than preserving your current session’s context budget, is where subagents shine.

In other words, when I have a task that specifically should not have project context, then subagents are great. Claude will also summon these “swarms” for the same reason. For example, you can ask it to analyze a specific issue from multiple relevant POVs, and it will create multiple specialized agents.

However, without fail, I’ve found that creating a subagent for a task that requires project context will result in worse outcomes than using “main CC”, because the sub simply doesn’t receive enough context.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#242

This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is buildi…

Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.

https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#243

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…

Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy. If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probab…

Developers do want managers actually, to simplify their daily lives. Otherwise they would self manage themselves better and keep more of the share of revenues for them

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#244

So this is Gas Town, just without the "Steve Yegge makes a quarter of a million on a memecoin pump-n-dump" step (yet)?

Am I the only one who’s been so late to crypto? I still have not touched a single cryptocurrency, even somewhat stable/legit ones. It always gives me a bit of FOMO hearing these stories

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#245
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this actually works. In 2026, software engineering is going to change a great deal as a result, and if you're not at least experimenting with this stuff to learn what it's capable of, that's a red flag for your career prospects. I don't mean this in a disparaging way. But we're at a car-meets-horse-and-buggy moment and it's happening really quickly. We all need to at least try driving a car and maybe park the ho…

The FOMO nonsense is really uncalled for. If everything is going to be vibecoded in the future then either theres going to be a million code-unfucking jobs or no jobs at all. Attitudes like that, where you believe that the richeous AI pushers will be saved from the coming rapture meanwhile everyone else will be out on the streets, really make people hate the AI crowd

The comment you’re replying to is actually very sensible and non-hypey. I wouldn’t even categorize it as particularly pro-AI, considering how ridiculous some of the frothing pro-AI stuff can get.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#246

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…

Interesting that your impl agents are not opus. I guess having the more rigorous spec pipeline helps scope it to something sonnet can knock out.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#247

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…

You probably implemented gastown.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#248

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…

Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy. If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probab…

I suppose it’s could end up being an LLM variant of Conway’s Law.

“Organizations are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy. If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probab…

Developers do want managers actually, to simplify their daily lives. Otherwise they would self manage themselves better and keep more of the share of revenues for them

Unfortunately some managers get lonely and want a friendly face in their org meetings, or can’t answer any technical questions, or aren’t actually tracking what their team is doing. And so they pull in an engineer from their team.

Being a manager is a hard job but the failure mode usually means an engineer is now doing something extra.

Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh really? I was looking at the Agent SDK for an idea and the docs seemed to imply that wasn't the case.

    Unless previously approved, we do not allow third party developers to offer Claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
I didn't dig deeper, but I'd pick it back up for a little personal project if I could just use my current subscription. Does it just use your local CC session out of the box?
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