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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

#51

Post by zachwills »

LastMuel wrote: post #49
pavel_lishin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Meh, maybe if I was selling something. I have nothing to sell. Just sharing my thoughts from going heads-down for a week and trying a new workflow.

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

#52

Post by lubujackson »

alaoallaka wrote: post #37

If anyone has links to maintaining a vibe coded (meaning you trust the LLM to some level as opposed to giving it a thorough review) product over a long period of time I’d love to see that! As is it’s always like this - lines of code, test coverage %, # of commits, etc. Metrics higher ups and others who don’t really know how to measure quality software love to point too. The only metric that’s reliable is the code, bu…

No links to share, by my approach is to create rich, up-to-date documentation that is structured positively for LLM prompt usage but also serves as breadcrumbs to the mental model of the product. When things change, have the LLM update the docs.

Think of this as "document-driven development" in the vein of "test-driven development". The goal is to never lose the big or mid-level picture of things and allow the LLMs to careful adjust those, then implement the details as it sees fit.

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

#53

Post by zachwills »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #42
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.

Yea, that's a good point. Some of the wording is prob too sensational.. esp. for Hacker News. Will keep that in mind!

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

#54

Post by holyjaw »

zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey HN, author here. I spent last week in a deep-dive experiment to see how far I could push modern agentic workflows on a greenfield project. I wanted to move past simple code generation and see if I could build a system where I was orchestrating a team of agents to build a full application. The results were pretty wild (~800 commits, 100+ PRs, and a functioning app we use internally at my company), but the most int…

It's cool to hear about the process, but I'd be much more interested to see it in action. You mentioned this was for a work project, so I doubt you can record yourself live working on it, but is there an adequately innocent proxy scenario you could gin up to demonstrate working on this for a shareable live demo? (Or even just screenshots)

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

#55

Post by zachwills »

holyjaw wrote: post #54
zachwills wrote: post #2

Hey HN, author here. I spent last week in a deep-dive experiment to see how far I could push modern agentic workflows on a greenfield project. I wanted to move past simple code generation and see if I could build a system where I was orchestrating a team of agents to build a full application. The results were pretty wild (~800 commits, 100+ PRs, and a functioning app we use internally at my company), but the most int…

It's cool to hear about the process, but I'd be much more interested to see it in action. You mentioned this was for a work project, so I doubt you can record yourself live working on it, but is there an adequately innocent proxy scenario you could gin up to demonstrate working on this for a shareable live demo? (Or even just screenshots)

I think I will build something open source or shareable to get around this. I understand now folks really want to / need to see the thing to get the most out of the learnings I share.

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

#56

Post by cyclonereef »

Of those 800+ commits, how many were for the prompt progress capture as compared to the actual code? It also feels contradictory to state something was both "production ready" and in the next sentence say "respectable alpha version". To my mind at least the two are very different levels of completion.

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

#58

Post by 4b11b4 »

lubujackson wrote: post #19

This tracks my experience, though I haven't gone into the "swarm" approach. One thing I don't think gets enough discussion is: > The cognitive load of this new state was immense. After about three hours of intense orchestration, I would feel completely burnt. I definitely feel that. It's like the job becomes solely architecting the system (not terrible) but you still need to hold the entire program in your head (deep…

I feel this tax on my energy also, and I think proper response is to take a lot more breaks instead of consider myself the bottleneck implying that now I must manage a swarm.

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

#59

Post by lm28469 »

zachwills wrote: post #50
lm28469 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No matter how much you actually wrote it feels like you dumped a list of bullet points to an llm and prompted "make it an SEO optimised blog post, I'm supposed to be interested in this topic so use appropriate words"

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

#60

Post by zachwills »

lm28469 wrote: post #59
zachwills wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No matter how much you actually wrote it feels like you dumped a list of bullet points to an llm and prompted "make it an SEO optimised blog post, I'm supposed to be interested in this topic so use appropriate words"

Got it. Will keep that in mind in the future; thank you!
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