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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

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

zachwills wrote: post #25
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion.

Again, like my other comment, I'm not being snarky - but it feels weird and inauthentic to be thanked for contributing to the discussion, and sounds like you ran my comment through ChatGPT as well and asked it to post a response.

But the end result indeed sounds like more than just a trivial app, so I am genuinely impressed it's working well. (I'd love to see how long it would take another team of engineers, or another single engineer I guess, to re-create with the same functionality.)

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

#42

Post by WhitneyLand »

ariwilson wrote: post #5

Editing notes on the content - the content of this blog post is clearly AI-enhanced (emdash) which is ok but the tone is not. It's super flowery and oversold - example "It was a shift from a single laser to a powerful floodlight."

Yes you’re right, it’s AI enhanced to the point of sounding not like an engineer authentically trying to communicate with other engineers.

However it’s also the direction given to the AI enhancement - it’s steered toward buzzword/hype style.

“I managed a swarm of AI agents…”? How about instead just “I ran multiple instances of Claude Code and the results seem promising”? No swarms necessary.

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

#43

Post by WhitneyLand »

zachwills wrote: post #22
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?

“if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?”

Yes, if you want code to be maintainable over time, or to be able to evolve as a coherent foundation that lends itself to a long term direction and vision.

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

#44

Post by zachwills »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #38
zachwills wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You're 100% right; This is a serious question, I'm not being snarky - do you run your comments through AI before posting them here?

No. That would be too much effort, honestly. Comments are less "polished" and formal IMO.

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

#45

Post by zachwills »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #43
zachwills wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

“if it achieves the business goals, is stable and performant, does it matter?” Yes, if you want code to be maintainable over time, or to be able to evolve as a coherent foundation that lends itself to a long term direction and vision.

I'd consider that part of the business goals, personally. I also think over time we will end up with more people doing what I talked about in the post, so the code that gets generated by those workflows will become the norm and will impact long-term direction/vision.

FWIW, the vision and direction can and should still be dictated by the human engineer. That's what engineers will be doing IMO vs. coding.

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

#46

Post by zachwills »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41
zachwills wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion. Again, like my other comment, I'm not being snarky - but it feels weird and inauthentic to be thanked for contributing to the discussion, and sounds like you ran my comment through ChatGPT as well and asked it to post a response. But the end result indeed sounds like more than just a trivial app, so I am genuinely impressed it's working well. (I'd love to s…

Haha, I know what you mean. I just believe in being civil. Some of the comments on here are just rude; so I am grateful when people are constructive or generally active in the discussion vs. random hate or bashing.

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

#48

Post by lm28469 »

zachwills wrote: post #20
lm28469 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this wasn't just X, it was Y I'm not even going to bother reading the rest. Just give me the bullet points you fed the LLM at that point

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.…

Once you know you're being tricked it doesn't matter how good the trick is, for me at least. I'd rather have a less coherent, typo ridden, but genuine text than this.

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

#49

Post by LastMuel »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41
zachwills wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Great points -- thanks for contributing to the discussion. Again, like my other comment, I'm not being snarky - but it feels weird and inauthentic to be thanked for contributing to the discussion, and sounds like you ran my comment through ChatGPT as well and asked it to post a response. But the end result indeed sounds like more than just a trivial app, so I am genuinely impressed it's working well. (I'd love to s…

I'm not entirely convinced that this entire thing isn't an experiment at throwing a complete dev / release cycle at some AI engine in some sort of weird marketing ploy.

"See, we built, announced and marketed an entire piece of software from our CLI prompt!"

Good gravy.

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

#50

Post by zachwills »

lm28469 wrote: post #48
zachwills wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Once you know you're being tricked it doesn't matter how good the trick is, for me at least. I'd rather have a less coherent, typo ridden, but genuine text than this.

How is it a trick to have AI organize my thoughts? It's all an accurate recount of my learnings and my experience doing what I said I did in the post. What trick is there?
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