8 ms·

How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

288 points by zachwills 1y ago

Frannky 1y ago
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.
- ehnto 1y ago
  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.
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    Claude is a junior. The more you work with it, the more you get a feel for which tasks it will ace unsupervised (some subset of grunt work) and which tasks to not even bother using it for. I don't trust Claude to write reams of code that I can't maintain except when that code is embarrassingly testable, i.e it has an external source of truth.
    - shaisjsh 1y ago
      > some subset of grunt work What tasks are these? I don’t doubt they’re out there, but if I know the exact code that needs to be generated typing speed is not a bottle neck. For me the slow part is determining what to write. And while AI helps with that (search, brainstorm, etc) by the time I know what to write trying to get the AI to enter those lines is often just a slow down. Much like writing up a ticket for a junior, I could write the code faster than I could write the English language rules describing how to write that code.
  - Frannky 1y ago
    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
    - abraxas 1y ago
      Fascinating. Do you have a longer writeup about it or an example repo for me to understand exactly how it fits together?
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  Using LLMs to code poses a liability most people can't appreciate, and won't admit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo Have a great day =3
CuriouslyC 1y ago
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.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  I don't use subagents to do things, they're best for analysing things. Like "evaluate the test coverage" or "check if the project follows the style guide". This way the "main" context only gets the report and doesn't waste space on massive test outputs or reading multiple files.
  - olivermuty 1y ago
    This is only a problem if an agent is made in a lazy way (all of them). Chat completion sends the full prompt history on every call. I am working on my own coding agent and seeing massive improvements by rewriting history using either a smaller model or a freestanding call to the main one. It really mitigates context poisoning.
    - mattmanser 1y ago
      Everyone complains that when you compact the context, Claude tends to get stupid Which as far as I understand it is summarizing the context with a smaller model. Am I misunderstanding you, as the practical experience of most people seem to contradict your results.
raminf 1y ago
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."
simianwords 1y ago
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.
- Jare 1y ago
  Would that be solved by having several clones of your repo, each with a IDE and a Claude working on each problem? Much like how multiple people work in parallel.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    Yeah but it’s not ideal. I thought of this too.
- posix86 1y ago
  This already exists. Look at cursor with Linear, you can just reply with @cursor & some instructions and it starts working in a vm. You can watch it work on cursor.com/agents or using the cursor editor. Result is a PR. Also github has copilot getting integrated in the github ui, but not that great in my experience
- muratsu 1y ago
  Why not just use only async agents? You can fire off many tasks and check PRs locally when they complete the work. (I also work on devfleet.ai to improve this experience, any feedback is appreciated)
user3939382 1y ago
I’ve got this down to a science.
dutchCourage 1y ago
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.
- jondwillis 1y ago
  I pretty much always attach (insert library here) LLM.txt as context, or a direct link to the documentation page for (insert framework feature) Not very agentic but it works a lot better.
  - dutchCourage 1y ago
    Indeed. Attaching the link (of the correct page) of the documentation worked in this case but I would've been faster than the AI. LLM.txt has been hit or miss. Maybe I need to adapt my workflow and have a granular plan of what needs to be done. However the complexity is in knowing what to do and when. Actually typing the code/running commands doesn't take that much time and energy. I feel like any time gained by overusing an LLM will be offset by having to debug its code when it messes things up.
- taspeotis 1y ago
  I’m training myself to have the muscle memory for putting it into planning mode before I start telling it what to do.
- kobalsky 1y ago
  I have seen it doing incredible stuff. One shotted adding a feature that included modifications to a proprietary backoffice system, db schema updates, defining new api models, implementing changes on the backend and then on the frontend. I've also seen seen it choking when tasked to add a simple result count on a search. The short answer is, it's cheap to let it try.
jackblemming 1y ago
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.
- tonkinai 1y ago
  I feel the same. We’re still in the very early days of AI agents. Honestly, just orchestrating CC subagents alone could already be a killer product.
  - zachwills 1y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot lately!
sixhobbits 1y ago
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?
- redrove 1y ago
  This has been my experience so far as well. It seems like just basic prompting gets me much further than all these complicated extras. At some point you gotta stop and wonder if you’re doing way too much work managing claude rather than your business problem.
- cpursley 1y ago
  I think the trick is the synthesize step which brings the agents findings together. That's where I've had the most success, at least.
- lucraft 1y ago
  Right - don’t make subagents for the different roles, make them to manage context for token heavy tasks. A backend developer subagent is going to do the job ok, but then the supervisor agent will be missing useful context about what’s been done and will go off the rails. The ideal sub agent is one that can take a simple question, use up massive amounts of tokens answering it, and then return a simple answer, dropping all those intermediate tokens as unnecessary. Documentation Search is a good one - does X library have a Y function - the subagent can search the web, read doc MCPs, and then return a simple answer without the supervisor needing to be polluted with all the context
  - csar 1y ago
    This is exactly right.
agigao 1y ago
One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness, let alone multiple ones... It's cool, but not very reliable or useful.
- siva7 1y ago
  It's resume driven development
- diggan 1y ago
  > One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness 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?
  - tharkun__ 1y ago
    Because they output so much code. It's a wall. Using a coding agent can make your entire work day turn into doing nothing but code reviews. I.e. the least fun part: constant review of a junior dev that's on the brink of failing their probation period with random strokes of genius.
deleted 1y ago
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rufasterisco 1y ago
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.
- zachwills 1y ago
  Yea, whoever / whatever cracks the nut on the standardized way to work in this new env is going to win big.
alxh 1y ago
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.
- zachwills 1y ago
  I think that is the whole point. The new limiting factor is going to be our own ability to multitask effectively. It will be a new skill to hone.
- ares623 1y ago
  Just one more agent...
- rufasterisco 1y ago
  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 "parallelizing" allows single (sub)agents with ad-hoc responsibilities to rely on separate "institutionalized" context/rules, .ie: architecture-agent and coder-agent can talk to each others and solve a decision-conflict based on wether one is making the decision based on concrete rules you have added, or hallucinating decisions i have seen a friend build a rule based system and have been impressed at how well LLM work within that context
  - jondwillis 1y ago
    Until your rules get poisoned…
beefcake 1y ago
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"
siva7 1y ago
Let's ask the obvious question: Is there any hard evidence that subagent flows give actual developers better experience than just using CC without?
- awb 1y ago
  Judging by the lack of responses and my own experience: no. Most subagent examples are vague or simplistic.
jongjong 1y ago
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.
skimojoe 1y ago
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.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.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  You don't need subagent, I shared this on ClaudeCode sub as well https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 Subagents do not work well for coding at all
  - weird-eye-issue 1y ago
    Subagents are literally built into Claude Code via a built-in tool where it can recursively call itself
    - faangguyindia 1y ago
      Yes I know, but subagent suffer from context amnesia during context handouts which is why this subagent use is flawed for purpose of coding product features. I've been using these tools a lot and installed every ai agent out there i could find.
      - 1y ago
misiti3780 1y ago
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 ?
Rover222 1y ago
Anyone tried Conductor? I use Claude Code and like the workflow, not sure if adding Conductor makes sense or not.
- zachwills 1y ago
  No, but I will check it out.
x1unix 1y ago
0 Days since AI post on HN
serendipityAI 1y ago
I built this tool https://github.com/btree1970/variant-ui 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.
user1999919 1y ago
as much as ai has been a boon to my own development i writhe at the thought of middle managers oversold on the promise of ai and its output, making unrealistic requests and demanding 'MORE PRODUCTIVITY' at the greater cost of making more work in the future. Diluting code-as-craft, and commodifying it down to shovels of coal into the furnace.
wrs 1y ago
These prompts remind me of the YouTubers giving people self-actualization advice. “Act like the person you want to be!” Telling the LLM that it is an experienced product manager doesn’t make it an experienced product manager, it just makes it sound like one. This is like launching an entire team of “fake it til you make it” employees.
deleted 1y ago
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a_bonobo 1y ago
Fun little story I recently had using Subagents in Claude Code: I was working on a large-ish R analysis. In R, people generally start with loading entire libraries like library(a) library(b) etc., leading to namespace clashes. It's better practice to replace all calls to package-functions with package namespaces, i.e., it's better to do a::function_a() b::function_b() than to load both libraries and then blindly trusting that function_a() and function_b() come from a and b. I asked Claude Code to take a >1000 LOC R script and replace all function calls with their model-namespace function call. It ran one subagent to look for function calls, identified >40 packages, and then started one subagent per package call for >40 subagents. Cost-wise (and speed-wise!) it was mayhem as every subagent re-read the script. It was far faster and cheaper, but a bit harder to judge, to just copy paste the R script into regular Claude and ask it to carry out the same action. The lesson is that subagents are often costly overkill.
d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
The biggest issue with sub-agents and even the CC Task tool is that they are black boxes, and we can’t see what’s going on inside them and cannot intervene. I’ve instead often found it better to leverage Tmux and have CC send messages to another CLI-agent (could be CC or the other now-surging CC, i.e., Codex-CLI, or of course any other competent CLI-agent) running in another pane. To make this smoother I built this Tmux-cli command that CC can use: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#tmux-cli-bridging-claude-code-and-interactive-clis https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main?ta... If the first CLI-agent just needs a review or suggestions of approaches, I find it helps to have the first agent ask the other CLI-agent to dump its analysis into a markdown file which it can then look at.
chandureddyvari 1y ago
There were other HN posts suggesting BMAD, ccpm, conductor, etc. I considered giving it a try. They were quite comprehensive, to the point where I was exhausted reading all the documentation they’ve generated before coding - product requirements, epics, user stories/journeys, tasks, analysis, architecture, project plans. The idea was to encapsulate the context for a subagent to work on in a single GitHub issue/document. I’m yet to see how the development/QA subagents will fare in real-world scenarios by relying on the context in the GitHub issue. Like many others here, I believe subagents will starve for context. Claude Code Agent is context-rich, while claude subagents are context-poor.
tzury 1y ago
This type of posts has nothing to do with real world applications. With all due respect to the .agents/ markdown files, Claude code often, like other LLMs, get fixed on a certain narrative, and no matter what the instructions are, it repeats that wrong choice over and over and over again, while “apologizing”… Anything beyond a close and intimate review of its implementation is doomed to fail. What made things a bit better recently was setting Gemini cli and Claude code taking turns in designing reviewing, implementing and testing each other.
- zachwills 1y ago
  We are using this sort of workflow in real world applications at work in brownfield codebases. It is working well!
zachwills 1y ago
Follow up from my last post; lots were asking for more examples. I will be around if anybody has questions this morning.
- bazhand 1y ago
  Can it work without Linear, using md files?
  - zachwills 1y ago
    Hey -- sorry was out of town so didn't see this! It could definitely work without Linear. You'd need to modify the command for the linear stuff to just write to MD files and make sure you pass those through to the other agents.

288 points by zachwills 1y ago

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.

ehnto 1y ago
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.
- zarzavat 1y ago
  Claude is a junior. The more you work with it, the more you get a feel for which tasks it will ace unsupervised (some subset of grunt work) and which tasks to not even bother using it for. I don't trust Claude to write reams of code that I can't maintain except when that code is embarrassingly testable, i.e it has an external source of truth.
  - shaisjsh 1y ago
    > some subset of grunt work What tasks are these? I don’t doubt they’re out there, but if I know the exact code that needs to be generated typing speed is not a bottle neck. For me the slow part is determining what to write. And while AI helps with that (search, brainstorm, etc) by the time I know what to write trying to get the AI to enter those lines is often just a slow down. Much like writing up a ticket for a junior, I could write the code faster than I could write the English language rules describing how to write that code.
- Frannky 1y ago
  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
  - abraxas 1y ago
    Fascinating. Do you have a longer writeup about it or an example repo for me to understand exactly how it fits together?
Joel_Mckay 1y ago
Using LLMs to code poses a liability most people can't appreciate, and won't admit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo Have a great day =3

CuriouslyC 1y ago

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.

theshrike79 1y ago
I don't use subagents to do things, they're best for analysing things. Like "evaluate the test coverage" or "check if the project follows the style guide". This way the "main" context only gets the report and doesn't waste space on massive test outputs or reading multiple files.
- olivermuty 1y ago
  This is only a problem if an agent is made in a lazy way (all of them). Chat completion sends the full prompt history on every call. I am working on my own coding agent and seeing massive improvements by rewriting history using either a smaller model or a freestanding call to the main one. It really mitigates context poisoning.
  - mattmanser 1y ago
    Everyone complains that when you compact the context, Claude tends to get stupid Which as far as I understand it is summarizing the context with a smaller model. Am I misunderstanding you, as the practical experience of most people seem to contradict your results.

raminf 1y ago

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."

simianwords 1y ago

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.

Jare 1y ago
Would that be solved by having several clones of your repo, each with a IDE and a Claude working on each problem? Much like how multiple people work in parallel.
- simianwords 1y ago
  Yeah but it’s not ideal. I thought of this too.
posix86 1y ago
This already exists. Look at cursor with Linear, you can just reply with @cursor & some instructions and it starts working in a vm. You can watch it work on cursor.com/agents or using the cursor editor. Result is a PR. Also github has copilot getting integrated in the github ui, but not that great in my experience
muratsu 1y ago
Why not just use only async agents? You can fire off many tasks and check PRs locally when they complete the work. (I also work on devfleet.ai to improve this experience, any feedback is appreciated)

user3939382 1y ago

I’ve got this down to a science.

dutchCourage 1y ago

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.

jondwillis 1y ago
I pretty much always attach (insert library here) LLM.txt as context, or a direct link to the documentation page for (insert framework feature) Not very agentic but it works a lot better.
- dutchCourage 1y ago
  Indeed. Attaching the link (of the correct page) of the documentation worked in this case but I would've been faster than the AI. LLM.txt has been hit or miss. Maybe I need to adapt my workflow and have a granular plan of what needs to be done. However the complexity is in knowing what to do and when. Actually typing the code/running commands doesn't take that much time and energy. I feel like any time gained by overusing an LLM will be offset by having to debug its code when it messes things up.
taspeotis 1y ago
I’m training myself to have the muscle memory for putting it into planning mode before I start telling it what to do.
kobalsky 1y ago
I have seen it doing incredible stuff. One shotted adding a feature that included modifications to a proprietary backoffice system, db schema updates, defining new api models, implementing changes on the backend and then on the frontend. I've also seen seen it choking when tasked to add a simple result count on a search. The short answer is, it's cheap to let it try.

jackblemming 1y ago

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.

tonkinai 1y ago
I feel the same. We’re still in the very early days of AI agents. Honestly, just orchestrating CC subagents alone could already be a killer product.
- zachwills 1y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately!

sixhobbits 1y ago

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?

redrove 1y ago
This has been my experience so far as well. It seems like just basic prompting gets me much further than all these complicated extras. At some point you gotta stop and wonder if you’re doing way too much work managing claude rather than your business problem.
cpursley 1y ago
I think the trick is the synthesize step which brings the agents findings together. That's where I've had the most success, at least.
lucraft 1y ago
Right - don’t make subagents for the different roles, make them to manage context for token heavy tasks. A backend developer subagent is going to do the job ok, but then the supervisor agent will be missing useful context about what’s been done and will go off the rails. The ideal sub agent is one that can take a simple question, use up massive amounts of tokens answering it, and then return a simple answer, dropping all those intermediate tokens as unnecessary. Documentation Search is a good one - does X library have a Y function - the subagent can search the web, read doc MCPs, and then return a simple answer without the supervisor needing to be polluted with all the context
- csar 1y ago
  This is exactly right.

agigao 1y ago

One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness, let alone multiple ones... It's cool, but not very reliable or useful.

siva7 1y ago
It's resume driven development
diggan 1y ago
> One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness 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?
- tharkun__ 1y ago
  Because they output so much code. It's a wall. Using a coding agent can make your entire work day turn into doing nothing but code reviews. I.e. the least fun part: constant review of a junior dev that's on the brink of failing their probation period with random strokes of genius.

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rufasterisco 1y ago

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.

zachwills 1y ago
Yea, whoever / whatever cracks the nut on the standardized way to work in this new env is going to win big.

alxh 1y ago

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.

zachwills 1y ago
I think that is the whole point. The new limiting factor is going to be our own ability to multitask effectively. It will be a new skill to hone.
ares623 1y ago
Just one more agent...
rufasterisco 1y ago
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 "parallelizing" allows single (sub)agents with ad-hoc responsibilities to rely on separate "institutionalized" context/rules, .ie: architecture-agent and coder-agent can talk to each others and solve a decision-conflict based on wether one is making the decision based on concrete rules you have added, or hallucinating decisions i have seen a friend build a rule based system and have been impressed at how well LLM work within that context
- jondwillis 1y ago
  Until your rules get poisoned…

beefcake 1y ago

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"

siva7 1y ago

Let's ask the obvious question: Is there any hard evidence that subagent flows give actual developers better experience than just using CC without?

awb 1y ago
Judging by the lack of responses and my own experience: no. Most subagent examples are vague or simplistic.

jongjong 1y ago

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.

skimojoe 1y ago

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.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.

faangguyindia 1y ago
You don't need subagent, I shared this on ClaudeCode sub as well https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 Subagents do not work well for coding at all
- weird-eye-issue 1y ago
  Subagents are literally built into Claude Code via a built-in tool where it can recursively call itself
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    Yes I know, but subagent suffer from context amnesia during context handouts which is why this subagent use is flawed for purpose of coding product features. I've been using these tools a lot and installed every ai agent out there i could find.
    - 1y ago

misiti3780 1y ago

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 ?

Rover222 1y ago

Anyone tried Conductor? I use Claude Code and like the workflow, not sure if adding Conductor makes sense or not.

zachwills 1y ago
No, but I will check it out.

x1unix 1y ago

0 Days since AI post on HN

serendipityAI 1y ago

I built this tool https://github.com/btree1970/variant-ui 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.

user1999919 1y ago

as much as ai has been a boon to my own development i writhe at the thought of middle managers oversold on the promise of ai and its output, making unrealistic requests and demanding 'MORE PRODUCTIVITY' at the greater cost of making more work in the future. Diluting code-as-craft, and commodifying it down to shovels of coal into the furnace.

wrs 1y ago

These prompts remind me of the YouTubers giving people self-actualization advice. “Act like the person you want to be!” Telling the LLM that it is an experienced product manager doesn’t make it an experienced product manager, it just makes it sound like one. This is like launching an entire team of “fake it til you make it” employees.

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a_bonobo 1y ago

Fun little story I recently had using Subagents in Claude Code: I was working on a large-ish R analysis. In R, people generally start with loading entire libraries like library(a) library(b) etc., leading to namespace clashes. It's better practice to replace all calls to package-functions with package namespaces, i.e., it's better to do a::function_a() b::function_b() than to load both libraries and then blindly trusting that function_a() and function_b() come from a and b. I asked Claude Code to take a >1000 LOC R script and replace all function calls with their model-namespace function call. It ran one subagent to look for function calls, identified >40 packages, and then started one subagent per package call for >40 subagents. Cost-wise (and speed-wise!) it was mayhem as every subagent re-read the script. It was far faster and cheaper, but a bit harder to judge, to just copy paste the R script into regular Claude and ask it to carry out the same action. The lesson is that subagents are often costly overkill.

d4rkp4ttern 1y ago

The biggest issue with sub-agents and even the CC Task tool is that they are black boxes, and we can’t see what’s going on inside them and cannot intervene. I’ve instead often found it better to leverage Tmux and have CC send messages to another CLI-agent (could be CC or the other now-surging CC, i.e., Codex-CLI, or of course any other competent CLI-agent) running in another pane. To make this smoother I built this Tmux-cli command that CC can use: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#tmux-cli-bridging-claude-code-and-interactive-clis https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/tree/main?ta... If the first CLI-agent just needs a review or suggestions of approaches, I find it helps to have the first agent ask the other CLI-agent to dump its analysis into a markdown file which it can then look at.

chandureddyvari 1y ago

There were other HN posts suggesting BMAD, ccpm, conductor, etc. I considered giving it a try. They were quite comprehensive, to the point where I was exhausted reading all the documentation they’ve generated before coding - product requirements, epics, user stories/journeys, tasks, analysis, architecture, project plans. The idea was to encapsulate the context for a subagent to work on in a single GitHub issue/document. I’m yet to see how the development/QA subagents will fare in real-world scenarios by relying on the context in the GitHub issue. Like many others here, I believe subagents will starve for context. Claude Code Agent is context-rich, while claude subagents are context-poor.

tzury 1y ago

This type of posts has nothing to do with real world applications. With all due respect to the .agents/ markdown files, Claude code often, like other LLMs, get fixed on a certain narrative, and no matter what the instructions are, it repeats that wrong choice over and over and over again, while “apologizing”… Anything beyond a close and intimate review of its implementation is doomed to fail. What made things a bit better recently was setting Gemini cli and Claude code taking turns in designing reviewing, implementing and testing each other.

zachwills 1y ago
We are using this sort of workflow in real world applications at work in brownfield codebases. It is working well!

zachwills 1y ago

Follow up from my last post; lots were asking for more examples. I will be around if anybody has questions this morning.

bazhand 1y ago
Can it work without Linear, using md files?
- zachwills 1y ago
  Hey -- sorry was out of town so didn't see this! It could definitely work without Linear. You'd need to modify the command for the linear stuff to just write to MD files and make sure you pass those through to the other agents.