You guys have been intentionally milking clocks and gate keeping information. Keep crying that you're losing your jobs. It's funny.
Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
281–290 of 351 posts
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are clearly behind, no offense but what do you do on HN
I usually try to stay polite here, but what a deeply stupid comment This person is on HN for the same reasons as I am, presumably: reading about hacker stuff. Entering prompts in black boxes and watching them work so you have more time to scratch your balls is not hacker stuff, it's the latest abomination of late stage capitalism and this forum is, sadly, falling for it.
Exactly my thought. I wasn't sure but I came across a wit comment the other day: that hackernews is a ycombinator forum that happens to be public.
I then went to see the latest batches. Cohorts are heavily building things that would support the fall for whatever this is. It needs supported or we won't make it.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's just the opposite, as LLMs feed on human language. "You are a scrum master." Automatically encodes most of what the LLM needs to know. Trying to describe the same role in a prompt would be a lot more difficult. Maybe a different separation of roles would be more efficient in theory, but an LLM understands "you are a scrum master" from the get go, while "you are a zhydgry bhnklorts" needs explanation.
This has been pretty comprehensively disproven: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054 Key findings: -Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions -Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added -Automatically identifying the best persona is challen…
How well does such llm research hold up as new models are released?
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this satire?
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…
Isn't all this a manual implementation of prompt routing, and, to a lesser extent, Mixture of Experts?
These tools and services are already expected to do the best job for specific prompts. The work you're doing pretty much proves that they don't, while also throwing much more money at them.
How much longer are users going to have to manually manage LLM context to get the most out of these tools? Why is this still a problem ~5 years into this tech?
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#285Ok 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…
This now makes me think that the only way to get AI to work well enough to actually actually replace programmers will probably be paying so much for compute that it's less expensive to just have a junior dev instead.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been pretty comprehensively disproven: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054 Key findings: -Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions -Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added -Automatically identifying the best persona is challen…
How well does such llm research hold up as new models are released?
Most model research decays because the evaluation harness isn’t treated as a stable artefact. If you freeze the tasks, acceptance criteria, and measurement method, you can swap models and still compare apples to apples. Without that, each release forces a reset and people mistake novelty for progress.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's insane to me that people choose to build anything in the perimeter of Claude Code (et al). The combination of the fairly primitive current state of them and the pace at which they're advancing means there is a lot of very obvious ideas/low-hanging fruit that will soon be executed 100x better by the people who own the core technology.
yeah I tend to agree. They're must be reaching the point where they can automate the analysis of claude code prompts to extract techniques and build them directly into the harness. Going up against that is brave!
It's always good to have viable alternatives, if only to prevent vendor lock-in in case they make some drastic changes in policy or pricing.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#288This feels like massively overengineering something very simple. Agents are stateless functions with a limited heap (context window) that degrades in quality as it fills. Once you see it that way, the whole swarm paradigm is just function scoping and memory management cosplaying as an org chart: Agent = function Role = scope constraints Context window = local memory Shared state file = global state Orchestration = co…
I don’t follow. You said it’s over engineering and then proposed what appears to be functionally the exact same thing?
Isn’t a “role” just a compact way to configure well-known systems of constraints by leveraging LLM training?
Is your proposal that everybody independently reinvent the constraints wheel, so to speak?
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#289Ok 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…
I was getting good results with a similar flow but was using claude max with ChatGPT. unfortunately not an option available to me anymore unless either I or my company wants to foot the bill.
Re: Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's just the opposite, as LLMs feed on human language. "You are a scrum master." Automatically encodes most of what the LLM needs to know. Trying to describe the same role in a prompt would be a lot more difficult. Maybe a different separation of roles would be more efficient in theory, but an LLM understands "you are a scrum master" from the get go, while "you are a zhydgry bhnklorts" needs explanation.
This has been pretty comprehensively disproven: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054 Key findings: -Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions -Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added -Automatically identifying the best persona is challen…
One study has “comprehensively disproven” something for you? You must be getting misled left right and centre if that’s how you absorb study results.