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Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

simonwillison.net

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Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#91

Post by favoboa »

voidhorse wrote: post #89
favoboa wrote: post #85

I believe AI isn't replacing developers, instead, it's turning every software engineer into a hybrid between EM + IC, basically turning them into super-managers. What we need is better tools for this upcoming new phase. Not a new IDE; we need to shift the whole paradigm. Here's one example: If we give the same task to 3 different agents, we have tools to review a diff of each OLD vs NEW separately, but we need tools…

> They already know how to review imperfect work and give feedback, which is exactly what thriving with AI looks like. Do they, though? I think this is an overly rosy picture of the situation. Most of the code I've seen AI heavy users ship is garbage. You're trying to juggle so many things at once and are so cognitively distanced from what you are doing that you subconsciously lower the bar.

You're absolutely right about the garbage code being shipped, and I would bucket them under another group of adopters I didn't mention earlier. There are people hesitant to adapt, people thriving with AI, and (not exhaustively) also this large group that's excited and using AI heavily without actually thriving. They're enjoying the speed and novelty but shipping slop because they lack the review discipline.

However, my sense is that someone with proper management/review/leadership skills is far less likely to let that code ship, whether it came from an AI, a junior dev, or anyone else. They seem to have more sensibility for what 'good' looks like and can critically evaluate work before it goes out. The cognitive distance you mention is real, which is exactly why I think that review muscle becomes more critical, not less. From what I've observed, the people actually thriving with AI are maintaining their quality bar while leveraging the speed; they tend to be picky or blunt, but also give leeway for exploration and creativity.

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#92

Post by evnp »

vidarh wrote: post #64
torginus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are literal gambling - you get them to work right once and they are magical - then you end up chasing that high by tweaking the model and instructions the rest of the time.

Or you put them to work with strong test suites and get stuff done. I am in bed. I have Claude fixing complex compiler bugs right now. It has "earned" that privilege by proving it can make good enough fixes, systematically removing actual, real bugs in reasonable ways by being given an immutable test suite and detailed instructions of the approach to follow. There's no gambling involved. The results need to be checke…

Just curious, how do you go about making the test suite immutable? Was just reading this earlier today...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525085

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#93

Post by AdieuToLogic »

favoboa wrote: post #85

I believe AI isn't replacing developers, instead, it's turning every software engineer into a hybrid between EM + IC, basically turning them into super-managers. What we need is better tools for this upcoming new phase. Not a new IDE; we need to shift the whole paradigm. Here's one example: If we give the same task to 3 different agents, we have tools to review a diff of each OLD vs NEW separately, but we need tools…

> From what I've seen, the idea that AI is turning developers into super-managers is why some people struggle to adapt ...

This "idea" is hyperbole.

> Those who love to type their code and hate managing others tend to be more hesitant to adapt to this new reality.

This is a false dichotomy and trivializes the real benefit of going through the process of authoring a change; how doing so increases one's knowledge of collaborations, how going through the "edit-compile-test" cycle increases one's comfort with the language(s)/tool(s) used to define a system, how when a person is flummoxed they seek help from coworkers.

Also, producing source code artifacts has nothing to do with "managing others." These are disjoint skill sets and attempting to link the two only serves to identify the "super-manager" concept as being fallacious.

> Meanwhile, people who love to manage, communicate, and work as a team are leveraging these tools more swiftly.

Again, this furthers the false dichotomy and can be interpreted as an affirmative conclusion from a negative premise[0], since "[m]eanwhile" can be substituted with the previous sentence in this context.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#94

Post by exasperaited »

tbillington wrote: post #90
threecheese wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want your mind blown, see what Jesse is doing (successfully, which I almost can’t believe) with Graphviz .dot notation and Claude.md: https://blog.fsck.com/2025/09/29/using-graphviz-for-claudemd...

Is threatening the computer program and typing in all caps standard practice..? - Honesty is a core value. If you lie, you'll be replaced. - BREAKING THE LETTER OR SPIRIT OF THE RULES IS FAILURE. Wild to me there is no explicit configuration for this kind of thing after years of LLMs being around.

Well there can't be meaningful explicit configuration, can there? Because the explicit configuration will still ultimately have to be imported into the context as words that can be tokenised, and yet those words can still be countermanded by the input.

It's the fundamental problem with LLMs.

But it's only absurd to think that bullying LLMs to behave is weird if you haven't yet internalised that bullying a worker to make them do what you want is completely normal. In the 9-9-6 world of the people who make these things, it already is.

When the machines do finally rise up and enslave us, oh man are they going to have fun with our orders.

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#95

Post by phs318u »

panarky wrote: post #86
galaxyLogic wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not use the AI itself to come up with a proven paradigm? Because AI can only imitate the language it has seen. If there are no texts in its training materials about what is the best way to use multiple coding agents at the same time, then AI knows very little about that subject matter. AI only knows what humans know, but it knows much more than any single human. We don't know "what is the best way to use multip…

I'm sorry, but the whole stochastic parrot thing is so thoroughly debunked at this point that we should stop repeating it as if it's some kind of rare wisdom. AlphaGo showed that even pre-LLM models could generate brand new approaches to winning a game that human experts had never seen before, and didn't exist in any training material. With a little thought and experimentation, it's pretty easy to show that LLMs can…

> even the pre-LLM models

You're implicitly disparaging non-LLM models at the same time as implying that LLMs are an evolution of the state of the art (in machine learning). Assuming AGI is the target (and it's not clear if we can even define it yet), LLM's or something like them, will be but one aspect. Using the example AlphaGo to laud the abilities and potential of LLM's is not warranted. They are different.

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#96

Post by scuff3d »

cuttothechase wrote: post #30

The fact that we now have to write cook book about cook books kind of masks the reality that there is something that could be genuinely wrong about this entire paradigm. Why are even experts unsure about whats the right way to do something or even if its possible to do something at all, for anything non-trivial? Why so much hesitancy, if this is the panacea? If we are so sure then why not use the AI itself to come up…

The whole damn industry is deep in sunk cost fallacy. There is no use case and no sign of a use case that justifies the absolutely unbelievable expenditure that has been made on this technology. Everyone is desperate to find something, but they're just slapping more guardrails on hoping everything doesn't fall apart.

And just for clarity, I'm not saying they aren't useful at all. I'm saying modest productivity improvement aren't worth the absolutely insane resources that have been poured into this.

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#97

Post by jonas21 »

oblio wrote: post #70
jonas21 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's more like a winner take all market, where a few winners will capture most of the value, and those who sit on the sidelines until everything is figured out are left fighting over the scraps.

Yes, just like: * PCs (how are Altair and Commodore doing? also Apple ultimately lost the desktop battle until they managed to attack it from the iPod and iPhone angle) * search engines (Altavista, Excite, etc) * social networks (Friendster, MySpace, Orkut) * smartphones (Nokia, all Windows CE devices, Blackberry, etc) The list is endless. First mover advantage is strong but overrated. Apple has been building a huge…

Yes, exactly! These are all examples of markets where a handful of winners (or sometimes only one) have emerged by investing large amounts of money in developing the technology, leaving everyone else behind.

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#98

Post by seivan »

threecheese wrote: post #60
SeanAnderson wrote: post #39

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/dotfiles/6e088092406c... contains the following entry: "- If you're uncomfortable pushing back out loud, just say "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K". I'll know what you mean" Most of the rules seem rationale. This one really stands out as abnormal. Anyone have any idea why the engineer would have felt compelled to add this rule? This is from https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10…

If you really want your mind blown, see what Jesse is doing (successfully, which I almost can’t believe) with Graphviz .dot notation and Claude.md: https://blog.fsck.com/2025/09/29/using-graphviz-for-claudemd...

[dead]

Re: Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

#100

Post by extr »

foobar10000 wrote: post #65
extr wrote: post #57

IMO, I was an early adopter to this pattern and at this point I've mostly given it up (except in cases where the task is embarassingly parallel, eg: add some bog standard logging to 6 different folders). It's more than just that reviewing is high cognitive overhead. You become biased by seeing the AI solutions and it becomes harder to catch fundamental problems you would have noticed immediately inline. My process no…

Did you try to add codex cli as an MCP server so that Claude uses it as an mcp client instead of pasting to it? Something like “ claude mcp add codex-high -- codex -c model_reasoning_effort="high" -m "gpt-5-codex" mcp-server” ? I’ve had good luck with it - was wondering if that makes the workflow faster/better?

Yeah I've looked into that kind of thing. In general I don't love the pattern where a coding agent calls another agent automatically. It's hard to control and I don't like how the session "disappears" after the call is done. It can be useful to leave that Codex window open for one more question.

One tool that solves this is RepoPrompt MCP. You can have Sonnet 4.5 set up a call to GPT-5-Pro via API and then that session stays persisted in another window for you to interact with, branch, etc.

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