51–60 of 131 posts
One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness, let alone multiple ones... It's cool, but not very reliable or useful.
Why not? I'm assuming we're not talking about "vibe coding" as it's not a serious workflow, it was suggested as a joke basically, and we're talking about working together with LLMs. Why would correctness be any harder to achieve than programming without them?
That sounds crazy to me, Claude Code has so many limitations. Last week I asked Claude Code to set up a Next.js project with internationalization. It tried to install a third party library instead of using the internationalization method recommended for the latest version of Next.js (using Next's middleware) and could not produce of functional version of the boilerplate site. There are some specific cases where agent…
Fast decision-making is terrible for software development. You can't make good decisions unless you have a complete understanding of all reasonable alternatives. There's no way that someone who is juggling 4 LLMs at the same time has the capacity to consider all reasonable alternatives when they make technical decisions.
IMO, considering all reasonable alternatives (and especially identifying the optimal approach) is a creative process, not a calculation. Creative processes cannot be rushed. People who rush into technical decisions tend to go for naive solutions; they don't give themselves the space to have real lightbulb moments.
Deep focus is good but great ideas arise out of synthesis. When I feel like I finally understand a problem deeply, I like to sleep on it.
One of my greatest pleasures is going to bed with a problem running through my head and then waking up with a simple, creative solution which saves you a ton of work.
I hate work. Work sucks. I try to minimize the amount of time I spend working; the best way to achieve that is by staring into space.
I've solved complex problems in a few days with a couple of thousand lines of code which took some other developers, more intelligent than myself, months and 20K+ lines of code to solve.
Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is going to call file-read tools etc.
I think its more theatre then utilty.
What I have taken to doing is having a parent folder and then frontend/ backend/ infra/ etc as children.
parent/CLAUDE.md frontend/CLAUDE.md backend/CLAUDE.md
The parent/CLAUDE.md provides a highlevel view of the stack "FastAPI backend with postgres, Next.js frontend using with tailwind, etc". The parent/CLAUDE.md also points to the childrens CLAUDE.md's which have more granular information.
I then just spawn a claude in the parent folder, set up plan mode, go back and forth on a design and then have it dump out to markdown to RFC/ and after that go to work. I find it does really well then as all changes it makes are made with a context of the other service.
I am sceptical if these persona based agents really make that much of a difference, and more "appear" to make a difference because of their talk style. Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is goin…
Subagents do not work well for coding at all
As someone who's built a project in this space, this is incredibly unreliable. Subagents don't get a full system prompt (including stuff like CLAUDE.md directions) so they are flying very blind in your projects, and as such will tend to get derailed by their lack of knowledge of a project and veer into mock solutions and "let me just make a simpler solution that demonstrates X." I advise people to only use subagents…
> Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly. Very much this. I tried to get Claude to move some code from one file to another. Some of the code went missing . Some of it was modified along the way. Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Code you didn't write is an even bigger liability, because if the AI gets off track and you can't guide it back, you may have to spend the time to learn it's code and fix the bugs. It's no different to inheriting a legacy application though. As well, from the perspective of a product owner, it's not a new risk.
There is no generated code. It is just a user interacting with a CLI terminal(via librechat frontend), guided by Markdown files, with access to MCPs
That sounds crazy to me, Claude Code has so many limitations. Last week I asked Claude Code to set up a Next.js project with internationalization. It tried to install a third party library instead of using the internationalization method recommended for the latest version of Next.js (using Next's middleware) and could not produce of functional version of the boilerplate site. There are some specific cases where agent…
Not very agentic but it works a lot better.
How do you not get lost mentally in what is exactly happening at each point in time? Just trusting the system and reviewing the final output? I feel like my cognitive constraints become the limits of this parallelized system. With a single workstream I pollute context, but feel way more secure somehow.
i suppose, gradually and the suddenly? each "fix" to incorrect reasoning/solution doesn't just solve the current instance, it also ends up in a rule-based system that will be used in future initially, being in the loop is necessary, once you find yourself "just approving" you can be relaxed and think back or, more likely, initially you need fine-grained tasks; as reliability grows, tasks can become more complex "para…