alt Hacker NewsI've all but given up on these types of approaches. Models will often just ignore your process instructions at the most inopportune moments. For work, I've resorted to mostly just using single agents for smallish pieces of work that I orchestrate myself. I treat it as a tool, with me being the craftsman.
Everyone is pushing Agent Fleets and Swarms, and I'm sure that there are many success stories, but from our internal experiments many devs don't see any speed advantage for complex work. Here's what one of them told us recently: "The speed advantage is offset by the manual refactoring work. The code is 'correct', but it's just not what any of us would have written".
Now one could argue that you could just ignore the code if it's working (that is in fact what Ex Co instructed us to do) and just keep running these fleets if the end result "works", but I'm not fully convinced this will end well in the long term.
Then again, I'm stuck with decades of legacy code and systems that noone understands that were introduced by humans...
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> Then again, I'm stuck with decades of legacy code and systems that noone understands that were introduced by humans...
But that's despite many efforts made to keep that code understandable, maybe even documented. If now that's not even tried the results will be a thousand times worse - and the dependency on the LLM absolute.
> many devs don't see any speed advantage for complex work
Swarms don't necessarily need to be about speed. You can get a lot of value from small swarms doing things like analysis or verification work.
The only time I ever few like I need agent swarms is when I am doing mechanical whole-codebase migrations/verification.
The LLMs are so much faster than I can check the output anyway. If I have a long-running task I just work on another one in parallel while I wait on the first one.
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First I wasn't sure if technical debt still matters but I think it absolutely does. As long as I'm involved in the planning phase at all, the complexity of the code base still bubbles up to me. Claude will say: ok we can build that but how should we handle legacy code paths A,B,C,D that no one needs and I wasn't even aware existed.