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Agents that run while I sleep

claudecodecamp.com

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Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#481

Post by jakevoytko »

aray07 wrote: post #460
jakevoytko wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been playing around with these kinds of prompts. My experience is that the prompts need a lot of iteration to truly one-shot something that is halfway usable. If it’s under-spec’d it’ll just return after 15-20 minutes with something that’s not even half baked. If I give it an extremely detailed spec it’ll start dropping requirements and then finish around the 60-70 minute mark, but I needed 20 minutes to write t…

The dropping requirements problem is real. What's helped us is breaking the spec into numbered ACs and having the verification run per-criterion. If AC-3 fails you know exactly what got dropped.

I'll try that out, thanks for the tip!

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#482

Post by ipaddr »

stavros wrote: post #329
tbossanova wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing; but PHP, in experienced hands, will be waaay more productive for small-to-medium things. One issue is that experienced hands are increasingly hard to come by. Truly big, complicated things, built by large teams or numbers of teams, teams with a lot of average brains or AIs trained on average brains, will be better off in something like Typescript/React. And everyone wants to work on the big complicated stuff…

I don't think it's true that experienced hands will be faster in PHP than in Python or JS or whatever. It's just about what you know, and experienced hands are experienced.

PHP is faster to develop in then Pythin or JS then addin a framework like Laravel and you are already done.

Python has the curse of spaces or tabs and JS has the curse of npm.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#483

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

frequencyai wrote: post #479
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I've been doing some DIY/citizen science type agent orchestration as well: https://blog.unratified.org/2026-03-06-receiving-side-agent-... Not quite to the same scale, but I share the same sentiment - working through scripts instead of the LLM is an important key, I think.

Really cool stuff, using git PRs as the transport layer is a clean pattern, also been exploring using this for other projects too. Most inter-agent coordination I've seen relies on shared state or message queues, the .well-known discovery angle is different. Have you experienced any bottlenecking with the human approval gate?

Thanks!

I'm just now at the point of having done a manual human-in-the-loop test once, still working through core bugs, etc., so haven't had a chance to notice bottlenecking, but i'm using github issues for the moment as the escalation channel - ideally, it won't be an issue, over time, as the system accumulates lessons and decisions, etc. that guide it away from mistakes that require human escalation.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#484

Post by stavros »

ipaddr wrote: post #482
stavros wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's true that experienced hands will be faster in PHP than in Python or JS or whatever. It's just about what you know, and experienced hands are experienced.

PHP is faster to develop in then Pythin or JS then addin a framework like Laravel and you are already done. Python has the curse of spaces or tabs and JS has the curse of npm.

PHP has the curse of T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#485

Post by gnatolf »

alexey-pelykh wrote: post #428
p0w3n3d wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my colleague recently said "hey I've burnt through $200 in Claude in 3 days". And he was prompting. Max 8hrs/day Imagine what would happen if AI was prompting. As I like this allegory really much, AI is (or should be) like and exoskeleton, should help people do things. If you step out of your car putting it first in drive mode, and going to sleep, next day it will be farther, but the question is, is it still on…

[dead]

Sorry but isn't the bottleneck then simply to do even relevant things? Like how much of a qualified backlog do you have that your pipeline does not run dry?

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#486

Post by aprdm »

zarzavat wrote: post #301
aprdm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why read code when you are getting results fast ? See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... I am not kidding. People don't seem to understand what's actually happening in our industry. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johubbard_github-eleutherailm...

I'm not getting results. That's the point. Claude doesn't fucking work without human intervention. When left to its own devices it makes bad decisions. It writes bad code. It needs constant supervision to stop it from going off the rails and replacing working code with broken code. It doesn't know what it's doing! It's about as far as you can get from being able to work independently. Yegge is an entertainer. Gas Tow…

How much are you spending ? See initial post of the thread. My team has no problems with it, they are spending each 5-10k per month.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#487

Post by throwaway7783 »

canadiantim wrote: post #182
throwaway7783 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. There is not a lot of harnesses/wrapping needed for Claude Code.

You don't need a harness beyond Claude Code, but honestly it's foolish to think you shouldn't be building out extra skills to help your workflow. A TDD skill that does red-green-refactoring is using Claude Code exactly as how it's meant to be used. They pioneered skills.

Yep, not saying we don't need skills. Just harnesses.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#488

Post by computerdork »

prerok wrote: post #288
computerdork wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, not so sure TDD is a failed paradigm. Maybe it isn't a pancea, but it is seems like it's changed how software development is done. Especially for backend software and also for tools, seems like automated tests can cover quite a lot of use cases a system encounters. Their coverage can become so good that they'll allow you to make major changes to the system, and as long as they pass the automated tests, you can f…

Indeed, they are two separate concepts. I write lots of automated tests, but almost always after the development is finished. The only exception is when reproducing a bug, where I first write the test that reproduces it, then I fix the code. TDD is about developing tests first then writing the code to make the tests pass. I know several people who gave it an honest try but gave up a few months later. They do advocate…

... hmm, just looked it up. According to some sites on the web, TDD was created by Kent Beck as apart of Extreme Programming in the 90's and automated testing is a big part of TDD. Having lived through that era, thinking back, would say that TDD did help to popularize automated testing. It made us realize that focusing a ton on writing tests had a lot of benefits (and yeah, most of us didn't do the test first development part).

But this is kind of splitting hairs on what TDD is, not too important.

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#489

Post by godelski »

josephg wrote: post #297
godelski wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…

Testing works because tests are (essentially) a second, crappy implementation of your software. Tests only pass if both implementations of your software behave the same way. Usually that will only happen if the test and the code are both correct. Imagine if your code (without tests) has a 5% defect rate. And the tests have a 5% defect rate (with 100% test coverage). Then ideally, you will have a 5%^2 defect rate afte…

  > Tests only pass if both implementations of your software behave the same way.
That's not true.

I even addressed this in my comment as did Dijkstra

Re: Agents that run while I sleep

#490

Post by godelski »

theshrike79 wrote: post #296
godelski wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…

When you write tests with LLM-generated code you're not trying to prove correctness in a mathematically sound way. I think of it more as "locking" the behavior to whatever it currently is. Either you do the red-green-with-multiple-adversarial-sub-agents -thing or just do the feature, poke the feature manually and if it looks good then you have the LLM write tests that confirm it keeps doing what it's supposed to do.…

  > you're not trying to prove correctness in a mathematically sound way.

  > "locking" the behavior to whatever it currently is.
These two sentences are incompatible

  > The #1 reason TDD failed is
Because spec is an ever evolving thing that cannot be determined a priori. And because it highly incentivized engineers to metric hack.

  > It's a bunch of repetition with slight variations
If that's how you're writing tests then you're writing them wrong. You have the wrong level of abstraction. Abstraction is not a dirty word. It solves these problems. Maybe juniors don't understand that abstraction and fuck it up while learning but making abstraction a dirty word is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

  > Eventually everyone starts copy-pasting crap
Which is a horrendous way to write code.
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