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  skimojoe
  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 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.mdThe 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.
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  CuriouslyC
  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 for stuff that is very compartmentalized because they're hard to monitor and prone to failure with complex codebases where agents live and die by project knowledge curated in files like CLAUDE.md. If your main Claude instance doesn't give a good handoff to a subagent, or a subagent doesn't give a good handback to the main Claude, shit will go sideways fast.Also, don't lean on agents for refactoring. Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly.
• serendipityAI
  I built this tool https://github.com/btree1970/variant-ui where you can use a sub-agent to spin up multiple branches with different code changes into the UI and compare them side by side in the browser.
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  sixhobbits
  I often see people making these sub agents modelled on roles like product manager, back end developer, etc.I spent a few hours trying stuff like this and the results were pretty bad compared to just using CC with no agent specific instructions.Maybe I needed to push through and find a combination that works but I don't find this article convincing as the author basically says "it works" without showing examples or comparing doing the same project with and without subagents.Anyone got anything more convincing to suggest it's worth me putting more time into building out flows like this instead of just using a generic agent for everything?
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  dutchCourage
  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 agentic AI does help me but I can't picture an agent running unchecked effectively in its current state.
• rufasterisco
  I'm commenting while agents run in project trying to achieve something similar to this. I feel like "we all" are trying to do something similar, in different ways, and in a fast moving space (i use claude code and didn't even know subagents were a thing).My gut feeling from past experiences is that we have git, but now git-flow, yet: a standardized approach that is simple to learn and implement across teams.Once (if?) someone will just "get it right", and has a reliable way to break this down do the point that engineer(s) can efficiently review specs and code against expectations, it'll be the moment where being a coder will have a different meaning, at large.So far, all projects i've seen end up building "frameworks" to match each person internal workflow. That's great and can be very effective for the single person (it is for me), but unless that can be shared across teams, throughput will still be limited (when compared that of a team of engs, with the same tools).Also, refactoring a project to fully leverage AI workflows might be inefficient, if compared to a rebuild from scratch to implement that from zero, since building docs for context in pair with development cannot be backported: it's likely already lost in time, and accrued as technical debt.
• beefcake
  What's the difference between using agents and playing the casino? Large part of the industry is a casino hidden in other clothes.I see people who never coded in their life signing up for loveable or some other code agent and try their luck.What cements this thought pattern in your post is this: "If the agents get it wrong, I don’t really care—I’ll just fire off another run"
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  alxh
  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.
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  agigao
  One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness, let alone multiple ones... It's cool, but not very reliable or useful.
• siva7
  Let's ask the obvious question: Is there any hard evidence that subagent flows give actual developers better experience than just using CC without?
• Rover222
  Anyone tried Conductor? I use Claude Code and like the workflow, not sure if adding Conductor makes sense or not.
• x1unix
  0 Days since AI post on HN
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  simianwords
  Slightly off topic but I would really like agentic workflow that is embedded in my IDE as well as my code host provider like GitHub for pull requests.Ideally I would like to spin off multiple agents to solve multiple bugs or features. The agents have to use the ci in GitHub to get feedback on tests. And I would like to view it on IDE because I like the ability to understand code by jumping through definitions.Support for multiple branches at once - I should be able to spin off multiple agents that work on multiple branches simultaneously.
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  Frannky
  Is it a good idea to generate more code faster to solve problems? Can I solve problems without generating code?If code is a liability and the best part is no part, what about leveraging Markdown files only?The last programs I created were just CLI agents with Markdown files and MCP servers(some code here but very little).The feedback loop is much faster, allowing me to understand what I want after experiencing it, and self-correction is super fast. Plus, you don't get lost in the implementation noise.
• raminf
  Was going to ask how much all this cost, but this sort of answers it:> "Managing Cost and Usage Limits: Chaining agents, especially in a loop, will increase your token usage significantly. This means you’ll hit the usage caps on plans like Claude Pro/Max much faster. You need to be cognizant of this and decide if the trade-off—dramatically increased output and velocity at the cost of higher usage—is worth it."
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  zachwills
  Follow up from my last post; lots were asking for more examples. I will be around if anybody has questions this morning.
• anon
  undefined
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  jackblemming
  All of this stuff seems completely insane to me and something my coding agent should handle for me. And it probably will in a year.
• user3939382
  I’ve got this down to a science.
• jongjong
  TBH I think the time it takes the agent to code is best spent thinking about the problem. This is where I see the real value of LLMs. They can free you up to think more about architecture and high level concepts.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.
• misiti3780
  I was bored yesterday and I tried to vibe code a simple react app yesterday using claude code and it was basically useless. It created a good shell of a code initially, but after 10 minutes I basically had to take over (It would be a feature, then regress the previous.)Am I the only one convinced that all of the hype around coding agents like codex and claude is 85% BS ?