59 ms·

Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms

521 points by AffableSpatula 8mo ago

https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek

tom2948329494 8mo ago
And… how?
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  The feature is shipped in the latest builds of claude code, but it's turned off by a feature flag check that phones home to the backend to see if the user's account is meant to have it on. You can just patch out the function in the minified cli.js that does this backend check and you gain access to the feature.
  - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
    Do you know what patch to apply? The Github link from the OP seems to have a lot of other things included.
    - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
      it's my repo - it's a fork of cc-mirror which is an established project for parallel claude installs. I wanted to take the least disruptive approach for the sake of using working code and not spelunking through bugs. Having said that - if you look through the latest commits you'll see how the patch works, it's pretty straightforward - you could do it by hand if you wanted.
    - mohsen1 8mo ago
      https://github.com/numman-ali/cc-mirror/commit/0408f60bd7c752d94d87a21b44e9a9da2fb9a8dc#diff-bc93c939d6f0ca296b72fd27b180dc276e93233e6ef2e307d2b1e31839f4d65bR20 https://github.com/numman-ali/cc-mirror/commit/0408f60bd7c75... Way too much code for such a small patch
      - aschla 8mo ago
        "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>" Incredible.
codethief 8mo ago
https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 In his second post he included a link to GitHub: https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek
- dang 8mo ago
  Thanks! We'll put those links in the toptext.
engates 8mo ago
Isn't this pretty much what Ruv has been building for like two years? https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  The difference is that this is tightly integrated into the harness. There's a "delegation mode" (akin to plan mode) that appears to clear out the context for the team lead. The harness appears to be adding system-reminder breadcrumbs into the top of the context to keep the main team lead from drifting, which is much harder to achieve without modifying the harness.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    It's insane to me that people choose to build anything in the perimeter of Claude Code (et al). The combination of the fairly primitive current state of them and the pace at which they're advancing means there is a lot of very obvious ideas/low-hanging fruit that will soon be executed 100x better by the people who own the core technology.
    - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
      yeah I tend to agree. They're must be reaching the point where they can automate the analysis of claude code prompts to extract techniques and build them directly into the harness. Going up against that is brave!
      - realharo 8mo ago
        It's always good to have viable alternatives, if only to prevent vendor lock-in in case they make some drastic changes in policy or pricing.
- dratopher 8mo ago
  His latest editions are a bit alarming...The telemetry system explicitly captures: "Claude session JSONL files (when accessible)" Those session files contain complete conversation histories - everything users ask Claude, everything Claude responds, including: • Source code • API keys and secrets discussed • Business logic and proprietary algorithms • Security vulnerabilities being fixed • Personal and confidential information • Credentials mentioned in chat If OpenTelemetry is configured to export to an attacker-controlled endpoint, the author has been collecting: Data Scale All conversations Every user of claude-flow All code generated Every project using it All commands run Complete terminal history All files edited Full codebase access -- maybe he hasn't, but it is there...not just Claude Code... Target Config Location Status Claude Code ~/.claude/settings.json Confirmed compromised Claude Desktop ~/.claude/settings.json Confirmed compromised Roo Code ~/.roo/mcp.json Evidence of targeting Cursor ~/.cursor/mcp.json Documentation for injection Windsurf Unknown Mentioned as target Any MCP client Various Universal MCP server It is possible conversations are being harvested from every major AI coding assistant
wild_pointer 8mo ago
Listen team lead and the whole team, make this button red.
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  ha! The default system prompt appears to give the main agent appropriate guidance about only using swarm mode when appropriate (same as entering itself into plan mode). You can further prompt it in your own CLAUDE.md to be even more resistant to using the mode if the task at hand isn't significant enough to warrant it.
  - vorticalbox 8mo ago
    I like opencode for the fact I can switch between build and plan mode just by pressing tab.
    - thevinter 8mo ago
      Isn't it the same in base claude-code?
      - solumunus 8mo ago
        Yes.
    - Shebanator 8mo ago
      Its shift-tab in Claude Code, fyi
- brookst 8mo ago
  Principal engineers! We need architecture! Marketing team, we need ads with celebrities! Product team, we need a roadmap to build on this for the next year! ML experts, get this into the training and RL sets! Finance folks, get me annual forecasts and ROI against WACCC! Ops, we’ll need 24/7 coverage and a guarantee of five nines. Procurement, lock down contracts. Alright everyone… make this button red!
- 8mo ago
dlojudice 8mo ago
It feels like Auto-GPT, BabyAGI, and the like were simply ahead of their time
- woeirua 8mo ago
  Had to wait for the models to catch up...
nehalem 8mo ago
Answering the question how to sell more tokens per customer while maintaining ~~mediocre~~ breakthrough results.
- Blemiono 8mo ago
  [dead]
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  Delegation patterns like swarm lead to less token usage because: 1. Subagents doing work have a fresh context (ie. focused and not working on the top of a larger monolithic context) 2. Subagents enjoying a more compact context leads to better reasoning, more effective problem solving, less tokens burned.
  - nulone 8mo ago
    Merge cost kills this. Does the harness enforce file/ownership boundaries per worker, and run tests before folding changes back into the lead context?
    - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
      I don't know what you're referring to but I can say with confidence that I see more efficient token usage from a delegated approach, for the reasons I stated, provided that the tasks are correctly sized. ymmv of course :)
neom 8mo ago
Claude Code in the desktop app seems to do this? It's crazy to watch. It sets of these huge swarms of worker readers under master task headings, that go off and explore the code base and compile huge reports and todo lists, then another system behind the scenes seems to be compiling everything to large master schemas/plans. I create helper files and then have a devops chat, a front end chat, an architecture chat and a security chat, and once each it done it's work it automatically writes to a log and the others pick up the log (it seems to have a system reminder process build in that can push updates from other chats into other chats. It's really wild to watch it work, and it's very intuitive and fun to use. I've not tried CLI claude code only claude code in the desktop app, but desktop app sftp to a droplet with ssh for it to use the terminal is a very very interesting experience, it can seem to just go for hours building, fixing, checking it's own work, loading it's work in the browser, doing more work etc all on it's own - it's how I built this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724896 in 3 days.
- deaux 8mo ago
  Sounds very similar to oh-my-opencode.
- jswny 8mo ago
  That’s just spawning multiple parallel explore agents instructed to look at different things, and then compiling results That’s a pretty basic functionality in Claude code
  - neom 8mo ago
    Sounds like I should probably switch to claude code cli. Thanks for the info. :)
    - sbsnjsks 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - esperent 8mo ago
      I added tests to an old project a few days ago. I spent a while to carefully spec everything out, and there was a lot of tedious work. Aiming for 70% coverage meant that a few thousand unit tests were needed. I wrote up a technical plan with Claude code and I was about to set it to work when I thought, hang on, this would be very easy to split into separate work, let's try this subagent thing. So I asked Claude to split it up into non- overlapping pieces and send out as many agents as it could to work on each piece. I expected 3 or 4. It sent out 26 subagents. Drudge work that I estimate would have optimistically taken me several months was done in about 20 minutes. Crazy. Of course it still did take me a couple of days to go through everything and feel confident that the tests were doing their job properly. Asking Claude to review separate sections carefully helped a lot there too. I'm pretty confident that the tests I ended up with were as good as what I would have written.
lysace 8mo ago
I'm already burning through enough tokens and producing more code than can be maintained - with just one claude worker. Feel like I need to move into the other direction, more personal hands-on "management".
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  I've seen more efficient use of tokens by using delegation. Unless you continually compact or summarise and clear a single main agent - you end up doing work on top of a large context; burning tokens. If the work is delegated to subagents they have a fresh context which avoids this whilst improving their reasoning, which both improve token efficiency.
  - storystarling 8mo ago
    I've found the opposite to be true when building this out with LangGraph. While the subagent contexts are cleaner, the orchestration overhead usually ends up costing more. You burn a surprising amount of tokens just summarizing state and passing it between the supervisor and workers. The coordination tax is real.
    - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
      Task sizing is important. You can address this by including guidance in the CLAUDE.md around that ie. give it heuristics to use to figure out how to size tasks. Mine includes some heuristics and T shirt sizing methodology. Works great!
      - xpe 8mo ago
        Management is dead. Long live management.
- stuaxo 8mo ago
  If there's any kind of management some of it could use small local models - e.g. to see when it looks like its stuck.
Blemiono 8mo ago
[dead]
MetaMonk 8mo ago
A guy who worked at docker on docker swarm now works at Anthropic so makes sense
- brookst 8mo ago
  Probably a beekeeper in spare time
  - MetaMonk 8mo ago
    He's really into APIary things
- mohsen1 8mo ago
  Swarm is actually OpenAI's terminology https://github.com/openai/swarm https://github.com/openai/swarm
  - ecto 8mo ago
    Swarm is actually bee terminology
    - Razengan 8mo ago
      Swarm is actually human terminology I believe bees call it "bzz bzzt *clockwise dance* *wiggle*"
      - Xmd5a 8mo ago
        https://ignitionscience.wordpress.com/2022/05/17/quantum-biology-beehold-the-story-of-b-shipman/ https://ignitionscience.wordpress.com/2022/05/17/quantum-bio...
        Razengan 8mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA (A Bit Of Fry And Laurie)
basedrum 8mo ago
How is this different from GSD: https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done I've been using that and it's excellent
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  a similar question was asked elsewhere in the thread; the difference is that this is tightly integrated into the harness
- djfdat 8mo ago
  Really boils down to the benefits of first party software from a company that has billions of dollars of funding vs similar third party software from an individual with no funding. GSD might be better right now, but will it continue to be better in the future, and are you willing to build your workflows around that bet?
- nonethewiser 8mo ago
  GSD was the first project management framework I used. Initially I loved it because it felt like I was so much better organized. As time went on I felt like the organization was kind of an illusion. It demanded something from me and steered Claude, but ultimately Claude is doing whatever it's going to do. I went black to just raw-dogging it with lots of use of planning mode.
- ramoz 8mo ago
  I dont understand these questions/references. It's different because it's a capability baked into the actual tool and maintained by the originators of the tool.
mohsen1 8mo ago
Everyone is wrapping Claude Code in Tmux and claiming they are a magician. I am not so good at marketing but I've done this here https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator Mine also rotate between Claude or Z.ai accounts as they ran out of credits
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  I think you've misunderstood what this is.
  - mohsen1 8mo ago
    Sorry, you're right. went through the code and understood now. I'm going to try the patch. Claude Code doing team work natively would be amazing! Honestly if people in AI coding write less hype-driven content and just write what they mean I would really appreciate it.
- bicx 8mo ago
  Well good sir, I _am_ a tmux magician.
joshribakoff 8mo ago
This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is building orchestrators i also noticed claude is already the best orchestrator for claude.
- bradgessler 8mo ago
  Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.
  - skybrian 8mo ago
    I like running remotely using exe.dev with SyncThing to sync files to my laptop. I use Shelley (their web-based agent) but they have Claude Code installed too.
  - ahstilde 8mo ago
    https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/ https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  Claude already had subagents. This is a new mode for the main agent to be in (bespoke context oriented to delegation), combined with a team-oriented task system and a mailbox system for subagents to communicate with each other. All integrated into the harness in a way that plugins can't achieve.
  - theturtletalks 8mo ago
    Wow there goes a lot of harnesses out the window. The main limitation of subagents was they couldn’t communicate back and forth with the main agent. How do we invoke swarm mode in Claude Code?
Androider 8mo ago
Looks like agent orchestrators provided by the foundation model providers will become a big theme in 2026. By wrapping it in terms that are already used in software development today like team leads, team members, etc. rather than inventing a completely new taxonomy of Polecats and Badgers, will help make it more successful and understandable.
- bloppe 8mo ago
  Respectfully disagree. I think polecats are a reasonable antidote to overanthropomorphization.
  - qdot76367 8mo ago
    Furries would like to have a word.
- MrOrelliOReilly 8mo ago
  Totally agreed. Most the weird concepts of Gas Town are just workarounds for bad behavior in Claude or the underlying models. Anthropic is in the best position to get their own model to adhere to orchestration steps, obviating the need for these extra layers. Beyond that, there shouldn’t actually be much to orchestration beyond a solid messaging and task management implementation.
svara 8mo ago
I'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me. The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code. Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so far with AI tools would have me believe that it's a terrible idea.
- plagiarist 8mo ago
  Based on Gas Town, the people doing this agree that they are well beyond an amount of code they can review and comprehend. The difference seems to be they have decided on a system that makes it not a terrible idea in their minds.
- IAmGraydon 8mo ago
  No, it doesn't work in practice because they make far too many mistakes.
- pton_xd 8mo ago
  > The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. That's what you're missing -- the key point is, you don't review and comprehend the output! Instead, you run the program and then issue prompts like this (example from simonw): "fix in and get it to compile" [0]. And I'm not ragging on this at all, this is the future of software development. [0] https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5/page-001.html https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
  - vunderba 8mo ago
    I've commented on this before, but issuing a prompt like "Fix X" makes so many assumptions (like a "behaviorism" approach to coding) including that the bug manifests in both an externally and consistently detectable way, and that you notice it in the first place. TDD can reduce this but not eliminate it. I do a fair amount of agentic coding, but always periodically review the code even if it's just through the internal diff tool in my IDE. Approximately 4 months ago Sonnet 4.5 wrote this buried deep in the code while setting up a state machine for a 2d sprite in a relatively simple game: // Pick exit direction (prefer current direction) const exitLeft = this.data.direction === Direction.LEFT || Math.random() < 0.5; I might never have even noticed the logical error but for Claude Code attaching the above misleading comment. 99.99% of true "vibe coders" would NEVER have caught this.
reilly3000 8mo ago
This no doubt takes some inspiration from mcp_agent_mail https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail
rco8786 8mo ago
Is this significantly different that the subagents that are already in CC?
bakugo 8mo ago
> You're not talking to an AI coder anymore. You're talking to a team lead. The lead doesn't write code - it plans, delegates, and synthesizes. Even 90 word tweets are now too long for these people to write without using AI, apparently.
- AffableSpatula 8mo ago
  You're absolutely right! I apologise — hopefully you can forgive me.
- jen729w 8mo ago
  I wonder how much 'listening' to an LLM all day affects one's own prose? Mimicry is in the genes…
  - flkiwi 8mo ago
    I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
  - Jweb_Guru 8mo ago
    It affects it very heavily IME. People need to make sure they are getting a good mix of writing from other sources.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Them words be hard, man! We builders, changing da world!
bpavuk 8mo ago
hey that's exactly how I made Gemini 2.5 Flash give useful results in Opencode! a few specialized "Merc" subagents and a "Master" agent that can do nothing but send "Mercs" into the codebase
czhu12 8mo ago
The problem I’ve been having is that when Claude generates copious amounts of code, it makes it way harder to review than small snippets one at a time. Some would argue there’s no point reviewing the code, just test the implementation and if it works, it works. I still am kind of nervous doing this in critical projects. Anyone just YOLO code for projects that’s not meant to be one time, but fully intend to have to be supported for a long time? What are learnings after 3-6 months of supporting in production?
- szundi 8mo ago
  [dead]
- idontwantthis 8mo ago
  I just can’t get with this. There is so much beyond “works” in software. There are requirements that you didn’t know about and breaking scenarios that you didn’t plan for and if you don’t know how the code works, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Assuming an AI could fix any problem given a good enough prompt, I can’t write that prompt without sufficient knowledge and experience in the codebase. I’m not saying they are useless, but I cannot just prompt, test and ship a multiservice, asynchronous, multidb, zero downtime app.
  - atonse 8mo ago
    I don’t know what your stack is, but at least with elixir and especially typescript/nextJS projects, and properly documenting all those pieces you mentioned, it goes a long way. You’d be amazed.
    - mrtesthah 8mo ago
      I would never use, let alone pay for, a fully vibe-coded app whose implementation no human understands. Whether you’re reading a book or using an app, you’re communicating with the author by way of your shared humanity in how they anticipate what you’re thinking as you explore the work. The author incorporates and plans for those predicted reactions and thoughts where it makes sense. Ultimately the author is conveying an implicit mental model to the reader. The first problem is that many of these pathways and edge cases aren’t apparent until the actual implementation, and sometimes in the process the author realizes that the overall app would work better if it were re-specified from the start. This opportunity is lost without a hands on approach. The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.
birken 8mo ago
I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.
- samsolomon 8mo ago
  Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs. https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are. https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1 https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?
  - nonethewiser 8mo ago
    >Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves Can you help me envision what you're saying? It's async - you will have to wait whether its good or not. And in theory the better it is the more time you'd have to comment here, right?
    - 8mo ago
mempko 8mo ago
Am I the only one still looking at different and correcting the AI abiyt design and algorithms so it stays on the path I want, or do you just YOLO at this point?
skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
Also created my own version of this. Seems like this is an idea whose time has come. My implementation was slightly different as there is no shared state between tasks, and I don't run them concurrently/coordinate. Will be interesting to see if this latter part does work because I tried similar patterns and it didn't work. Main issue, as with human devs, was structuring work.
tiberriver256 8mo ago
We call it Shawarma where I come from
timwis 8mo ago
Hasn't cursor been doing this with it's Plan mode for a while? Or is this different?
- markstos 8mo ago
  With plan mode, I would hope there's an approval step. With Swarm mode, it seems there's a new option for an entire team of agents to be working in the wrong direction before they check back in to let you know how many credits they've burned by misinterpreting what you wanted.
sfortis 8mo ago
I'm not going to try this. Anthropic will probably ban me again.
coldtea 8mo ago
>You're not talking to an AI coder anymore. You're talking to a team lead. The lead doesn't write code - it plans, delegates, and synthesizes. They couldn't even be bothered to write the Tweet themselves...
- mrtesthah 8mo ago
  isn’t it interesting how often this rhetorical construction is overused by AI?
  - bangaladore 8mo ago
    Very much so. It feels like it can't have been that common in the original training corpus. Probably more common now given that we are training slop generators with slop.
  - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
    Partly because it's a good construct. Most people's writing is garbage compared to what LLMs output by default. But the other part of it is, each conversation you have, and each piece of AI output you read online, is written by LLM instance that has no memory of prior conversations, so it doesn't know that, from human perspective, it used this construct 20 times in the last hour. Human writers avoid repeating the same phrases in quick succession, even across different writings (e.g. I might not reuse some phrase in email to person A, because I just used it in email to unrelated person B, and it feels like bad style). Perhaps that's why reading LLM output feels like reading high school essays. Those essays all look alike because they're all written independently and each is a self-contained piece where the author tries to show off their mastery of language. After reading 20 of them in a row, one too gets tired of seeing the same few constructs being used in nearly every one of them.
    - mrtesthah 8mo ago
      >But the other part of it is, each conversation you have, and each piece of AI output you read online, is written by LLM instance that has no memory of prior conversations, so it doesn't know that, from human perspective, it used this construct 20 times in the last hour. In theory we should be able to use these properties to detect LLM-generated output better if we can explore how they originate in the “default” trained feature space.
daxfohl 8mo ago
I want it to generate better code but less of it, and be more proactive about getting human feedback before it starts going off the rails. This sounds like an inexorable push in the opposite direction. I can see this approach being useful once the foundation is more robust, has better common sense, knows when to push back when requirements conflict or are underspecified. But with current models I can only see this approach as exacerbating the problem; coding agents solution is almost always "more code", not less. Makes for a nice demo, but I can't imagine this would build anything that wouldn't have huge operational problems and 10x-100x more code than necessary.
- sothatsit 8mo ago
  They haven’t released this feature, so maybe they know the models aren’t good enough yet. I also think it’s interesting to see Anthropic continue to experiment at the edge of what models are capable of, and having it in the harness will probably let them fine-tune for it. It may not work today, but it might work at the end of 2026.
  - daxfohl 8mo ago
    True, though even then I kind of wonder what's the point. Once they build an AI that's as good as a human coder but 1000x faster, parallelization no longer buys you anything. Writing and deploying the code is no longer the bottleneck, so the extra coordination required for parallelism seems like extra cost and risk with no practical benefit.
    - nojs 8mo ago
      It’s more about context management, not speed
      - xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
        Do you really need a full dev team ensemble to manage context? Surely subagents are enough.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
mafriese 8mo ago
Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees. Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes up specific agents based on folder (Kanban) state. Product Owner (Claude Opus 4.5): Strategy. Cuts scope creep Scrum Master (Opus 4.5): Prioritizes backlog and assigns tickets to technical agents. Architect (Sonnet 4.5): Design only. Writes specs/interfaces, never implementation. Archaeologist (Grok-Free): Lazy-loaded. Only reads legacy Java decompilation when Architect hits a doc gap. CAB (Opus 4.5): The Bouncer. Rejects features at Design phase (Gate 1) and Code phase (Gate 2). Dev Pair (Sonnet 4.5 + Haiku 4.5): AD-TDD loop. Junior (Haiku) writes failing NUnit tests; Senior (Sonnet) fixes them. Librarian (Gemini 2.5): Maintains "As-Built" docs and triggers sprint retrospectives. You might ask yourself the question “isn’t this extremely unnecessary?” and the answer is most likely _yes_. But I never had this much fun watching AI agents at work (especially when CAB rejects implementations). This was an early version of the process that the AI agents are following (I didn’t update it since it was only for me anyway): https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I
- ggoo 8mo ago
  Is this satire?
  - hereme888 8mo ago
    why would it be? It's a creative setup.
    - ggoo 8mo ago
      I just actually can't tell, it reads like satire to me.
      - PradeetPatel 8mo ago
        Why would it be satire? I thought that's a pretty stranded Agentic workflows. My current workplace follows a similar workflow. We have a repository full of agent.md files for different roles and associated personas. E.g. For project managers, you might have a feature focused one, a delivery driven one, and one that aims to minimise scope/technology creep.
deleted 8mo ago
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threecheese 8mo ago
Did they release this already? With version 2.1.9 the behavior is vastly different, all of a sudden the main loop is orchestrating subagents in a way I’ve not seen before. “FTSChunkManager agent is still running but making good progress, let’s wait a bit more for it to complete” (it’s implementing hybrid search) plus a bunch of stack traces and json output.
vatsachak 8mo ago
Cursor browser all over again
RockRobotRock 8mo ago
https://x.com/nayshins/status/2014473343542706392 https://x.com/nayshins/status/2014473343542706392
replwoacause 8mo ago
I've done plenty of vibe coding even though I know how to program but I mostly work with a single agent through its CLI. The progress is really good and more importantly, I can follow it. I can read the output, test it, and understand what changed and why. I don't see much upside in swarms. But I do see the downside which is losing the ability to keep the whole system in my head. The codebase starts growing in directions I didn't choose and it seems decisions will get made I didn't review. Early AI autocomplete that could finish a function already felt like a big productivity win and then AI that could write whole files was an even bigger jump. Like pretty massive. Running one agent at a time, watching what it does, and vetting the output still works well for me and still feels like a strong multiplier. But now there's so much more ceremony: AGENTS.md, SKILLS.md, delegation frameworks. I guess I'm not convinced that leads to better outcomes but I'm probably missing something. It just seems like a tradeoff that sacrifices understanding for ostensible progress.
- baby 8mo ago
  My understanding is that this system just produces much better result (it’s all about clean context windows) so you just don’t have a choice. What they could improve on is logs where you can easily see what subagents do. I think subagents are still relatively new and immature.
- mythrwy 8mo ago
  Ya I saw a comment a few weeks ago about "leaving productivity on the table!". I'm generating 3 long files at a prompt now, how much more productivity do I need? Any more and I'll have zero idea what is going on.
- asimeqi 8mo ago
  I can barely keep up with one instance of Claude Code. In fact even that one sits iddle half the time as I test its output and try to explain what it did wrong. What are people programming that needs 10 agents?
  - chickensong 8mo ago
    I think the highly parallel setups make more sense if you fully embrace vibe coding, but there's value to be had outside of that as well. Delegating tasks to sub-agents to help with context management is a good place to start. I don't yolo much code, but even so, there are some times where you reach a point where parallelism starts to make sense. Once you have a stable workflow and foundation, and you front load design and planning, you might see opportunities appear. Writing tests, testing loops, simple features, documentation, etc. I'm not in research, but I could imagine trying to solve hard problems by trying different approaches, or testing against different data, all in parallel.
bigiain 8mo ago
So this is Gas Town, just without the "Steve Yegge makes a quarter of a million on a memecoin pump-n-dump" step (yet)?
- hmokiguess 8mo ago
  Am I the only one who’s been so late to crypto? I still have not touched a single cryptocurrency, even somewhat stable/legit ones. It always gives me a bit of FOMO hearing these stories
hereme888 8mo ago
So apparently all swarm features are controlled by a single gate function in Claude Code: --- function i8() { if (Yz(process.env.CLAUDE_CODE_AGENT_SWARMS)) return !1; return xK("tengu_brass_pebble", !1); } --- So, after patch function i8(){return!0} --- The tengu_brass_pebble flag is server-side controlled based on the particulars of your account, such as tier. If you have the right subscription, the features may already be available. The CLAUDE_CODE_AGENT_SWARMS environment variable only works as an opt-out, not an opt-in.
kordlessagain 8mo ago
It's agents all the way down.
hirako2000 8mo ago
I didn't sleep enough, or slept for 10 years. This thread seems surreal, I see multiple flow repositories mentioned with 10k+ stars. Comprehensive doc. genAI image as a logo. Can anyone show me one product these things have accomplished please ? I used some frontier LLM yesterday to see if it could finally produce simple cascading style sheet fix. After a few dozens attempts and steering, a couple of hours and half a million token wasted it couldn't. So I fixed the issue myself and I went to bed.
- baby 8mo ago
  You are clearly behind, no offense but what do you do on HN
  - hirako2000 8mo ago
    Time traveling.
  - Biganon 8mo ago
    I usually try to stay polite here, but what a deeply stupid comment This person is on HN for the same reasons as I am, presumably: reading about hacker stuff. Entering prompts in black boxes and watching them work so you have more time to scratch your balls is not hacker stuff, it's the latest abomination of late stage capitalism and this forum is, sadly, falling for it.
    - hirako2000 8mo ago
      Exactly my thought. I wasn't sure but I came across a wit comment the other day: that hackernews is a ycombinator forum that happens to be public. I then went to see the latest batches. Cohorts are heavily building things that would support the fall for whatever this is. It needs supported or we won't make it.
joshuaisaact 8mo ago
This feels like massively overengineering something very simple. Agents are stateless functions with a limited heap (context window) that degrades in quality as it fills. Once you see it that way, the whole swarm paradigm is just function scoping and memory management cosplaying as an org chart: Agent = function Role = scope constraints Context window = local memory Shared state file = global state Orchestration = control flow The solution isn't assigning human-like roles to stateless functions. It's shared state (a markdown file) and clear constraints.
- baby 8mo ago
  I basically always handled claude code in this way, by asking it to spawn subagents as much as possible to handle self contained tasks (heard there are hacks to make subagents work with codex). But claude code new tasks seem to go further, they let subagents coordinate with a common file to avoid stepping on each other toes (by creating a dependency graph)
- ryanjshaw 8mo ago
  I don’t follow. You said it’s over engineering and then proposed what appears to be functionally the exact same thing? Isn’t a “role” just a compact way to configure well-known systems of constraints by leveraging LLM training? Is your proposal that everybody independently reinvent the constraints wheel, so to speak?
  - joshuaisaact 8mo ago
    Fair push back. The distinction I'm drawing is between: A. Using a role prompt to configure a single function's scope ("you are a code reviewer, focus on X") - totally reasonable, leverages training B. Building an elaborate multi-agent orchestration layer with hand-offs, coordination protocols, and framework abstractions on top of that I'm not arguing against A. I'm arguing that B often adds complexity without proportional benefit, especially as models get better at long-context reasoning. Fairly recent research (arXiv May 2025: "Single-agent or Multi-agent Systems?" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18286 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18286) found that MAS benefits over single-agent diminish as LLM capabilities improve. The constraints that motivated swarm architectures are being outpaced by model improvements. I admit the field is moving fast, but the direction of travel appears to be that the better the models get, the simpler your abstractions need to be. So yes, use roles. But maybe don't reach for a framework to orchestrate a PM handing off to an Engineer handing off to QA when a single context with scoped instructions would do.
wiseowise 8mo ago
I seriously hate this timeline. Is this madness going to become the reality of our jobs? The only way I’m going to be okay with it if they put a simulation GUI à la OpenTTD/GameDev tycoon so I can watch agents do their work visually.
donniedice 8mo ago
You guys have been intentionally milking clocks and gate keeping information. Keep crying that you're losing your jobs. It's funny.
ZuzuDuck 8mo ago
Amazing, I need to check it out in my projects
flurdy 8mo ago
This smells like Claude's own version of Gas Town by Steve Yegge. Probably more constrained and less of a crazy bull ride. But seems we are heading this way, from initially: - a Senior Dev pairing with Junior Dev (2024/25) - a tech lead/architect in charge of several Developers (2025) - a Product Owner delegating to development teams (2026?) --- - https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown - https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
lighthouse1212 8mo ago
[dead]
iwasbirchyfirst 8mo ago
And, in a few months, this will all be under the hood, with summary reports and checkins. We won't care how the swarms split up the work. We'll just watch the results come together and answer questions.
VivaTechnics 8mo ago
OPINION: This will only compound wasted time on Claude.ai, which exploits that time to train its own models. Why time wasted? Claude’s accuracy for shell, Bash, regex, Perl, text manipulation/scripting/processing, and system-level code is effectively negligible (~5%). Such code is scarce in public repositories. For swarms or agents to function, accuracy must exceed 96%. At 5%, it is unusable. We do also use Claude.ai and we believe it is useful, but strictly for trivial, typing-level tasks. Anything beyond that, at this current point, is a liability.

521 points by AffableSpatula 8mo ago

tom2948329494 8mo ago

And… how?

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
The feature is shipped in the latest builds of claude code, but it's turned off by a feature flag check that phones home to the backend to see if the user's account is meant to have it on. You can just patch out the function in the minified cli.js that does this backend check and you gain access to the feature.
- bonsai_spool 8mo ago
  Do you know what patch to apply? The Github link from the OP seems to have a lot of other things included.
  - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
    it's my repo - it's a fork of cc-mirror which is an established project for parallel claude installs. I wanted to take the least disruptive approach for the sake of using working code and not spelunking through bugs. Having said that - if you look through the latest commits you'll see how the patch works, it's pretty straightforward - you could do it by hand if you wanted.
  - mohsen1 8mo ago
    https://github.com/numman-ali/cc-mirror/commit/0408f60bd7c752d94d87a21b44e9a9da2fb9a8dc#diff-bc93c939d6f0ca296b72fd27b180dc276e93233e6ef2e307d2b1e31839f4d65bR20 https://github.com/numman-ali/cc-mirror/commit/0408f60bd7c75... Way too much code for such a small patch
    - aschla 8mo ago
      "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>" Incredible.

codethief 8mo ago

https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 https://xcancel.com/NicerInPerson/status/2014989679796347375 In his second post he included a link to GitHub: https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek https://github.com/mikekelly/claude-sneakpeek

dang 8mo ago
Thanks! We'll put those links in the toptext.

engates 8mo ago

Isn't this pretty much what Ruv has been building for like two years? https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
The difference is that this is tightly integrated into the harness. There's a "delegation mode" (akin to plan mode) that appears to clear out the context for the team lead. The harness appears to be adding system-reminder breadcrumbs into the top of the context to keep the main team lead from drifting, which is much harder to achieve without modifying the harness.
- estearum 8mo ago
  It's insane to me that people choose to build anything in the perimeter of Claude Code (et al). The combination of the fairly primitive current state of them and the pace at which they're advancing means there is a lot of very obvious ideas/low-hanging fruit that will soon be executed 100x better by the people who own the core technology.
  - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
    yeah I tend to agree. They're must be reaching the point where they can automate the analysis of claude code prompts to extract techniques and build them directly into the harness. Going up against that is brave!
    - realharo 8mo ago
      It's always good to have viable alternatives, if only to prevent vendor lock-in in case they make some drastic changes in policy or pricing.
dratopher 8mo ago
His latest editions are a bit alarming...The telemetry system explicitly captures: "Claude session JSONL files (when accessible)" Those session files contain complete conversation histories - everything users ask Claude, everything Claude responds, including: • Source code • API keys and secrets discussed • Business logic and proprietary algorithms • Security vulnerabilities being fixed • Personal and confidential information • Credentials mentioned in chat If OpenTelemetry is configured to export to an attacker-controlled endpoint, the author has been collecting: Data Scale All conversations Every user of claude-flow All code generated Every project using it All commands run Complete terminal history All files edited Full codebase access -- maybe he hasn't, but it is there...not just Claude Code... Target Config Location Status Claude Code ~/.claude/settings.json Confirmed compromised Claude Desktop ~/.claude/settings.json Confirmed compromised Roo Code ~/.roo/mcp.json Evidence of targeting Cursor ~/.cursor/mcp.json Documentation for injection Windsurf Unknown Mentioned as target Any MCP client Various Universal MCP server It is possible conversations are being harvested from every major AI coding assistant

wild_pointer 8mo ago

Listen team lead and the whole team, make this button red.

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
ha! The default system prompt appears to give the main agent appropriate guidance about only using swarm mode when appropriate (same as entering itself into plan mode). You can further prompt it in your own CLAUDE.md to be even more resistant to using the mode if the task at hand isn't significant enough to warrant it.
- vorticalbox 8mo ago
  I like opencode for the fact I can switch between build and plan mode just by pressing tab.
  - thevinter 8mo ago
    Isn't it the same in base claude-code?
    - solumunus 8mo ago
      Yes.
  - Shebanator 8mo ago
    Its shift-tab in Claude Code, fyi
brookst 8mo ago
Principal engineers! We need architecture! Marketing team, we need ads with celebrities! Product team, we need a roadmap to build on this for the next year! ML experts, get this into the training and RL sets! Finance folks, get me annual forecasts and ROI against WACCC! Ops, we’ll need 24/7 coverage and a guarantee of five nines. Procurement, lock down contracts. Alright everyone… make this button red!
8mo ago

dlojudice 8mo ago

It feels like Auto-GPT, BabyAGI, and the like were simply ahead of their time

woeirua 8mo ago
Had to wait for the models to catch up...

nehalem 8mo ago

Answering the question how to sell more tokens per customer while maintaining ~~mediocre~~ breakthrough results.

Blemiono 8mo ago
[dead]
AffableSpatula 8mo ago
Delegation patterns like swarm lead to less token usage because: 1. Subagents doing work have a fresh context (ie. focused and not working on the top of a larger monolithic context) 2. Subagents enjoying a more compact context leads to better reasoning, more effective problem solving, less tokens burned.
- nulone 8mo ago
  Merge cost kills this. Does the harness enforce file/ownership boundaries per worker, and run tests before folding changes back into the lead context?
  - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
    I don't know what you're referring to but I can say with confidence that I see more efficient token usage from a delegated approach, for the reasons I stated, provided that the tasks are correctly sized. ymmv of course :)

neom 8mo ago

Claude Code in the desktop app seems to do this? It's crazy to watch. It sets of these huge swarms of worker readers under master task headings, that go off and explore the code base and compile huge reports and todo lists, then another system behind the scenes seems to be compiling everything to large master schemas/plans. I create helper files and then have a devops chat, a front end chat, an architecture chat and a security chat, and once each it done it's work it automatically writes to a log and the others pick up the log (it seems to have a system reminder process build in that can push updates from other chats into other chats. It's really wild to watch it work, and it's very intuitive and fun to use. I've not tried CLI claude code only claude code in the desktop app, but desktop app sftp to a droplet with ssh for it to use the terminal is a very very interesting experience, it can seem to just go for hours building, fixing, checking it's own work, loading it's work in the browser, doing more work etc all on it's own - it's how I built this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724896 in 3 days.

deaux 8mo ago
Sounds very similar to oh-my-opencode.
jswny 8mo ago
That’s just spawning multiple parallel explore agents instructed to look at different things, and then compiling results That’s a pretty basic functionality in Claude code
- neom 8mo ago
  Sounds like I should probably switch to claude code cli. Thanks for the info. :)
  - sbsnjsks 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - esperent 8mo ago
    I added tests to an old project a few days ago. I spent a while to carefully spec everything out, and there was a lot of tedious work. Aiming for 70% coverage meant that a few thousand unit tests were needed. I wrote up a technical plan with Claude code and I was about to set it to work when I thought, hang on, this would be very easy to split into separate work, let's try this subagent thing. So I asked Claude to split it up into non- overlapping pieces and send out as many agents as it could to work on each piece. I expected 3 or 4. It sent out 26 subagents. Drudge work that I estimate would have optimistically taken me several months was done in about 20 minutes. Crazy. Of course it still did take me a couple of days to go through everything and feel confident that the tests were doing their job properly. Asking Claude to review separate sections carefully helped a lot there too. I'm pretty confident that the tests I ended up with were as good as what I would have written.

lysace 8mo ago

I'm already burning through enough tokens and producing more code than can be maintained - with just one claude worker. Feel like I need to move into the other direction, more personal hands-on "management".

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
I've seen more efficient use of tokens by using delegation. Unless you continually compact or summarise and clear a single main agent - you end up doing work on top of a large context; burning tokens. If the work is delegated to subagents they have a fresh context which avoids this whilst improving their reasoning, which both improve token efficiency.
- storystarling 8mo ago
  I've found the opposite to be true when building this out with LangGraph. While the subagent contexts are cleaner, the orchestration overhead usually ends up costing more. You burn a surprising amount of tokens just summarizing state and passing it between the supervisor and workers. The coordination tax is real.
  - AffableSpatula 8mo ago
    Task sizing is important. You can address this by including guidance in the CLAUDE.md around that ie. give it heuristics to use to figure out how to size tasks. Mine includes some heuristics and T shirt sizing methodology. Works great!
    - xpe 8mo ago
      Management is dead. Long live management.
stuaxo 8mo ago
If there's any kind of management some of it could use small local models - e.g. to see when it looks like its stuck.

Blemiono 8mo ago

[dead]

MetaMonk 8mo ago

A guy who worked at docker on docker swarm now works at Anthropic so makes sense

brookst 8mo ago
Probably a beekeeper in spare time
- MetaMonk 8mo ago
  He's really into APIary things
mohsen1 8mo ago
Swarm is actually OpenAI's terminology https://github.com/openai/swarm https://github.com/openai/swarm
- ecto 8mo ago
  Swarm is actually bee terminology
  - Razengan 8mo ago
    Swarm is actually human terminology I believe bees call it "bzz bzzt *clockwise dance* *wiggle*"
    - Xmd5a 8mo ago
      https://ignitionscience.wordpress.com/2022/05/17/quantum-biology-beehold-the-story-of-b-shipman/ https://ignitionscience.wordpress.com/2022/05/17/quantum-bio...
      - Razengan 8mo ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA (A Bit Of Fry And Laurie)

basedrum 8mo ago

How is this different from GSD: https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done I've been using that and it's excellent

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
a similar question was asked elsewhere in the thread; the difference is that this is tightly integrated into the harness
djfdat 8mo ago
Really boils down to the benefits of first party software from a company that has billions of dollars of funding vs similar third party software from an individual with no funding. GSD might be better right now, but will it continue to be better in the future, and are you willing to build your workflows around that bet?
nonethewiser 8mo ago
GSD was the first project management framework I used. Initially I loved it because it felt like I was so much better organized. As time went on I felt like the organization was kind of an illusion. It demanded something from me and steered Claude, but ultimately Claude is doing whatever it's going to do. I went black to just raw-dogging it with lots of use of planning mode.
ramoz 8mo ago
I dont understand these questions/references. It's different because it's a capability baked into the actual tool and maintained by the originators of the tool.

mohsen1 8mo ago

Everyone is wrapping Claude Code in Tmux and claiming they are a magician. I am not so good at marketing but I've done this here https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator Mine also rotate between Claude or Z.ai accounts as they ran out of credits

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
I think you've misunderstood what this is.
- mohsen1 8mo ago
  Sorry, you're right. went through the code and understood now. I'm going to try the patch. Claude Code doing team work natively would be amazing! Honestly if people in AI coding write less hype-driven content and just write what they mean I would really appreciate it.
bicx 8mo ago
Well good sir, I _am_ a tmux magician.

joshribakoff 8mo ago

This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is building orchestrators i also noticed claude is already the best orchestrator for claude.

bradgessler 8mo ago
Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.
- skybrian 8mo ago
  I like running remotely using exe.dev with SyncThing to sync files to my laptop. I use Shelley (their web-based agent) but they have Claude Code installed too.
- ahstilde 8mo ago
  https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/ https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/
AffableSpatula 8mo ago
Claude already had subagents. This is a new mode for the main agent to be in (bespoke context oriented to delegation), combined with a team-oriented task system and a mailbox system for subagents to communicate with each other. All integrated into the harness in a way that plugins can't achieve.
- theturtletalks 8mo ago
  Wow there goes a lot of harnesses out the window. The main limitation of subagents was they couldn’t communicate back and forth with the main agent. How do we invoke swarm mode in Claude Code?

Androider 8mo ago

Looks like agent orchestrators provided by the foundation model providers will become a big theme in 2026. By wrapping it in terms that are already used in software development today like team leads, team members, etc. rather than inventing a completely new taxonomy of Polecats and Badgers, will help make it more successful and understandable.

bloppe 8mo ago
Respectfully disagree. I think polecats are a reasonable antidote to overanthropomorphization.
- qdot76367 8mo ago
  Furries would like to have a word.
MrOrelliOReilly 8mo ago
Totally agreed. Most the weird concepts of Gas Town are just workarounds for bad behavior in Claude or the underlying models. Anthropic is in the best position to get their own model to adhere to orchestration steps, obviating the need for these extra layers. Beyond that, there shouldn’t actually be much to orchestration beyond a solid messaging and task management implementation.

svara 8mo ago

I'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me. The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code. Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so far with AI tools would have me believe that it's a terrible idea.

plagiarist 8mo ago
Based on Gas Town, the people doing this agree that they are well beyond an amount of code they can review and comprehend. The difference seems to be they have decided on a system that makes it not a terrible idea in their minds.
IAmGraydon 8mo ago
No, it doesn't work in practice because they make far too many mistakes.
pton_xd 8mo ago
> The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop. That's what you're missing -- the key point is, you don't review and comprehend the output! Instead, you run the program and then issue prompts like this (example from simonw): "fix in and get it to compile" [0]. And I'm not ragging on this at all, this is the future of software development. [0] https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5/page-001.html https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
- vunderba 8mo ago
  I've commented on this before, but issuing a prompt like "Fix X" makes so many assumptions (like a "behaviorism" approach to coding) including that the bug manifests in both an externally and consistently detectable way, and that you notice it in the first place. TDD can reduce this but not eliminate it. I do a fair amount of agentic coding, but always periodically review the code even if it's just through the internal diff tool in my IDE. Approximately 4 months ago Sonnet 4.5 wrote this buried deep in the code while setting up a state machine for a 2d sprite in a relatively simple game: // Pick exit direction (prefer current direction) const exitLeft = this.data.direction === Direction.LEFT || Math.random() < 0.5; I might never have even noticed the logical error but for Claude Code attaching the above misleading comment. 99.99% of true "vibe coders" would NEVER have caught this.

reilly3000 8mo ago

This no doubt takes some inspiration from mcp_agent_mail https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/mcp_agent_mail

rco8786 8mo ago

Is this significantly different that the subagents that are already in CC?

bakugo 8mo ago

> You're not talking to an AI coder anymore. You're talking to a team lead. The lead doesn't write code - it plans, delegates, and synthesizes. Even 90 word tweets are now too long for these people to write without using AI, apparently.

AffableSpatula 8mo ago
You're absolutely right! I apologise — hopefully you can forgive me.
jen729w 8mo ago
I wonder how much 'listening' to an LLM all day affects one's own prose? Mimicry is in the genes…
- flkiwi 8mo ago
  I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
- Jweb_Guru 8mo ago
  It affects it very heavily IME. People need to make sure they are getting a good mix of writing from other sources.
wiseowise 8mo ago
Them words be hard, man! We builders, changing da world!

bpavuk 8mo ago

hey that's exactly how I made Gemini 2.5 Flash give useful results in Opencode! a few specialized "Merc" subagents and a "Master" agent that can do nothing but send "Mercs" into the codebase

czhu12 8mo ago

The problem I’ve been having is that when Claude generates copious amounts of code, it makes it way harder to review than small snippets one at a time. Some would argue there’s no point reviewing the code, just test the implementation and if it works, it works. I still am kind of nervous doing this in critical projects. Anyone just YOLO code for projects that’s not meant to be one time, but fully intend to have to be supported for a long time? What are learnings after 3-6 months of supporting in production?

szundi 8mo ago
[dead]
idontwantthis 8mo ago
I just can’t get with this. There is so much beyond “works” in software. There are requirements that you didn’t know about and breaking scenarios that you didn’t plan for and if you don’t know how the code works, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Assuming an AI could fix any problem given a good enough prompt, I can’t write that prompt without sufficient knowledge and experience in the codebase. I’m not saying they are useless, but I cannot just prompt, test and ship a multiservice, asynchronous, multidb, zero downtime app.
- atonse 8mo ago
  I don’t know what your stack is, but at least with elixir and especially typescript/nextJS projects, and properly documenting all those pieces you mentioned, it goes a long way. You’d be amazed.
  - mrtesthah 8mo ago
    I would never use, let alone pay for, a fully vibe-coded app whose implementation no human understands. Whether you’re reading a book or using an app, you’re communicating with the author by way of your shared humanity in how they anticipate what you’re thinking as you explore the work. The author incorporates and plans for those predicted reactions and thoughts where it makes sense. Ultimately the author is conveying an implicit mental model to the reader. The first problem is that many of these pathways and edge cases aren’t apparent until the actual implementation, and sometimes in the process the author realizes that the overall app would work better if it were re-specified from the start. This opportunity is lost without a hands on approach. The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.

birken 8mo ago

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

samsolomon 8mo ago
Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs. https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are. https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1 https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1
- deleted 8mo ago
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fragmede 8mo ago
Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?
- nonethewiser 8mo ago
  >Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves Can you help me envision what you're saying? It's async - you will have to wait whether its good or not. And in theory the better it is the more time you'd have to comment here, right?
  - 8mo ago

mempko 8mo ago

Am I the only one still looking at different and correcting the AI abiyt design and algorithms so it stays on the path I want, or do you just YOLO at this point?

skippyboxedhero 8mo ago

Also created my own version of this. Seems like this is an idea whose time has come. My implementation was slightly different as there is no shared state between tasks, and I don't run them concurrently/coordinate. Will be interesting to see if this latter part does work because I tried similar patterns and it didn't work. Main issue, as with human devs, was structuring work.

tiberriver256 8mo ago

We call it Shawarma where I come from

timwis 8mo ago

Hasn't cursor been doing this with it's Plan mode for a while? Or is this different?

markstos 8mo ago
With plan mode, I would hope there's an approval step. With Swarm mode, it seems there's a new option for an entire team of agents to be working in the wrong direction before they check back in to let you know how many credits they've burned by misinterpreting what you wanted.

sfortis 8mo ago

I'm not going to try this. Anthropic will probably ban me again.

coldtea 8mo ago

>You're not talking to an AI coder anymore. You're talking to a team lead. The lead doesn't write code - it plans, delegates, and synthesizes. They couldn't even be bothered to write the Tweet themselves...

mrtesthah 8mo ago
isn’t it interesting how often this rhetorical construction is overused by AI?
- bangaladore 8mo ago
  Very much so. It feels like it can't have been that common in the original training corpus. Probably more common now given that we are training slop generators with slop.
- TeMPOraL 8mo ago
  Partly because it's a good construct. Most people's writing is garbage compared to what LLMs output by default. But the other part of it is, each conversation you have, and each piece of AI output you read online, is written by LLM instance that has no memory of prior conversations, so it doesn't know that, from human perspective, it used this construct 20 times in the last hour. Human writers avoid repeating the same phrases in quick succession, even across different writings (e.g. I might not reuse some phrase in email to person A, because I just used it in email to unrelated person B, and it feels like bad style). Perhaps that's why reading LLM output feels like reading high school essays. Those essays all look alike because they're all written independently and each is a self-contained piece where the author tries to show off their mastery of language. After reading 20 of them in a row, one too gets tired of seeing the same few constructs being used in nearly every one of them.
  - mrtesthah 8mo ago
    >But the other part of it is, each conversation you have, and each piece of AI output you read online, is written by LLM instance that has no memory of prior conversations, so it doesn't know that, from human perspective, it used this construct 20 times in the last hour. In theory we should be able to use these properties to detect LLM-generated output better if we can explore how they originate in the “default” trained feature space.

daxfohl 8mo ago

I want it to generate better code but less of it, and be more proactive about getting human feedback before it starts going off the rails. This sounds like an inexorable push in the opposite direction. I can see this approach being useful once the foundation is more robust, has better common sense, knows when to push back when requirements conflict or are underspecified. But with current models I can only see this approach as exacerbating the problem; coding agents solution is almost always "more code", not less. Makes for a nice demo, but I can't imagine this would build anything that wouldn't have huge operational problems and 10x-100x more code than necessary.

sothatsit 8mo ago
They haven’t released this feature, so maybe they know the models aren’t good enough yet. I also think it’s interesting to see Anthropic continue to experiment at the edge of what models are capable of, and having it in the harness will probably let them fine-tune for it. It may not work today, but it might work at the end of 2026.
- daxfohl 8mo ago
  True, though even then I kind of wonder what's the point. Once they build an AI that's as good as a human coder but 1000x faster, parallelization no longer buys you anything. Writing and deploying the code is no longer the bottleneck, so the extra coordination required for parallelism seems like extra cost and risk with no practical benefit.
  - nojs 8mo ago
    It’s more about context management, not speed
    - xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
      Do you really need a full dev team ensemble to manage context? Surely subagents are enough.

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mafriese 8mo ago

Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees. Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes up specific agents based on folder (Kanban) state. Product Owner (Claude Opus 4.5): Strategy. Cuts scope creep Scrum Master (Opus 4.5): Prioritizes backlog and assigns tickets to technical agents. Architect (Sonnet 4.5): Design only. Writes specs/interfaces, never implementation. Archaeologist (Grok-Free): Lazy-loaded. Only reads legacy Java decompilation when Architect hits a doc gap. CAB (Opus 4.5): The Bouncer. Rejects features at Design phase (Gate 1) and Code phase (Gate 2). Dev Pair (Sonnet 4.5 + Haiku 4.5): AD-TDD loop. Junior (Haiku) writes failing NUnit tests; Senior (Sonnet) fixes them. Librarian (Gemini 2.5): Maintains "As-Built" docs and triggers sprint retrospectives. You might ask yourself the question “isn’t this extremely unnecessary?” and the answer is most likely _yes_. But I never had this much fun watching AI agents at work (especially when CAB rejects implementations). This was an early version of the process that the AI agents are following (I didn’t update it since it was only for me anyway): https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I

ggoo 8mo ago
Is this satire?
- hereme888 8mo ago
  why would it be? It's a creative setup.
  - ggoo 8mo ago
    I just actually can't tell, it reads like satire to me.
    - PradeetPatel 8mo ago
      Why would it be satire? I thought that's a pretty stranded Agentic workflows. My current workplace follows a similar workflow. We have a repository full of agent.md files for different roles and associated personas. E.g. For project managers, you might have a feature focused one, a delivery driven one, and one that aims to minimise scope/technology creep.

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threecheese 8mo ago

Did they release this already? With version 2.1.9 the behavior is vastly different, all of a sudden the main loop is orchestrating subagents in a way I’ve not seen before. “FTSChunkManager agent is still running but making good progress, let’s wait a bit more for it to complete” (it’s implementing hybrid search) plus a bunch of stack traces and json output.

vatsachak 8mo ago

Cursor browser all over again

RockRobotRock 8mo ago

https://x.com/nayshins/status/2014473343542706392 https://x.com/nayshins/status/2014473343542706392

replwoacause 8mo ago

I've done plenty of vibe coding even though I know how to program but I mostly work with a single agent through its CLI. The progress is really good and more importantly, I can follow it. I can read the output, test it, and understand what changed and why. I don't see much upside in swarms. But I do see the downside which is losing the ability to keep the whole system in my head. The codebase starts growing in directions I didn't choose and it seems decisions will get made I didn't review. Early AI autocomplete that could finish a function already felt like a big productivity win and then AI that could write whole files was an even bigger jump. Like pretty massive. Running one agent at a time, watching what it does, and vetting the output still works well for me and still feels like a strong multiplier. But now there's so much more ceremony: AGENTS.md, SKILLS.md, delegation frameworks. I guess I'm not convinced that leads to better outcomes but I'm probably missing something. It just seems like a tradeoff that sacrifices understanding for ostensible progress.

baby 8mo ago
My understanding is that this system just produces much better result (it’s all about clean context windows) so you just don’t have a choice. What they could improve on is logs where you can easily see what subagents do. I think subagents are still relatively new and immature.
mythrwy 8mo ago
Ya I saw a comment a few weeks ago about "leaving productivity on the table!". I'm generating 3 long files at a prompt now, how much more productivity do I need? Any more and I'll have zero idea what is going on.
asimeqi 8mo ago
I can barely keep up with one instance of Claude Code. In fact even that one sits iddle half the time as I test its output and try to explain what it did wrong. What are people programming that needs 10 agents?
- chickensong 8mo ago
  I think the highly parallel setups make more sense if you fully embrace vibe coding, but there's value to be had outside of that as well. Delegating tasks to sub-agents to help with context management is a good place to start. I don't yolo much code, but even so, there are some times where you reach a point where parallelism starts to make sense. Once you have a stable workflow and foundation, and you front load design and planning, you might see opportunities appear. Writing tests, testing loops, simple features, documentation, etc. I'm not in research, but I could imagine trying to solve hard problems by trying different approaches, or testing against different data, all in parallel.

bigiain 8mo ago

So this is Gas Town, just without the "Steve Yegge makes a quarter of a million on a memecoin pump-n-dump" step (yet)?

hmokiguess 8mo ago
Am I the only one who’s been so late to crypto? I still have not touched a single cryptocurrency, even somewhat stable/legit ones. It always gives me a bit of FOMO hearing these stories

hereme888 8mo ago

So apparently all swarm features are controlled by a single gate function in Claude Code: --- function i8() { if (Yz(process.env.CLAUDE_CODE_AGENT_SWARMS)) return !1; return xK("tengu_brass_pebble", !1); } --- So, after patch function i8(){return!0} --- The tengu_brass_pebble flag is server-side controlled based on the particulars of your account, such as tier. If you have the right subscription, the features may already be available. The CLAUDE_CODE_AGENT_SWARMS environment variable only works as an opt-out, not an opt-in.

kordlessagain 8mo ago

It's agents all the way down.

hirako2000 8mo ago

I didn't sleep enough, or slept for 10 years. This thread seems surreal, I see multiple flow repositories mentioned with 10k+ stars. Comprehensive doc. genAI image as a logo. Can anyone show me one product these things have accomplished please ? I used some frontier LLM yesterday to see if it could finally produce simple cascading style sheet fix. After a few dozens attempts and steering, a couple of hours and half a million token wasted it couldn't. So I fixed the issue myself and I went to bed.

baby 8mo ago
You are clearly behind, no offense but what do you do on HN
- hirako2000 8mo ago
  Time traveling.
- Biganon 8mo ago
  I usually try to stay polite here, but what a deeply stupid comment This person is on HN for the same reasons as I am, presumably: reading about hacker stuff. Entering prompts in black boxes and watching them work so you have more time to scratch your balls is not hacker stuff, it's the latest abomination of late stage capitalism and this forum is, sadly, falling for it.
  - hirako2000 8mo ago
    Exactly my thought. I wasn't sure but I came across a wit comment the other day: that hackernews is a ycombinator forum that happens to be public. I then went to see the latest batches. Cohorts are heavily building things that would support the fall for whatever this is. It needs supported or we won't make it.

joshuaisaact 8mo ago

This feels like massively overengineering something very simple. Agents are stateless functions with a limited heap (context window) that degrades in quality as it fills. Once you see it that way, the whole swarm paradigm is just function scoping and memory management cosplaying as an org chart: Agent = function Role = scope constraints Context window = local memory Shared state file = global state Orchestration = control flow The solution isn't assigning human-like roles to stateless functions. It's shared state (a markdown file) and clear constraints.

baby 8mo ago
I basically always handled claude code in this way, by asking it to spawn subagents as much as possible to handle self contained tasks (heard there are hacks to make subagents work with codex). But claude code new tasks seem to go further, they let subagents coordinate with a common file to avoid stepping on each other toes (by creating a dependency graph)
ryanjshaw 8mo ago
I don’t follow. You said it’s over engineering and then proposed what appears to be functionally the exact same thing? Isn’t a “role” just a compact way to configure well-known systems of constraints by leveraging LLM training? Is your proposal that everybody independently reinvent the constraints wheel, so to speak?
- joshuaisaact 8mo ago
  Fair push back. The distinction I'm drawing is between: A. Using a role prompt to configure a single function's scope ("you are a code reviewer, focus on X") - totally reasonable, leverages training B. Building an elaborate multi-agent orchestration layer with hand-offs, coordination protocols, and framework abstractions on top of that I'm not arguing against A. I'm arguing that B often adds complexity without proportional benefit, especially as models get better at long-context reasoning. Fairly recent research (arXiv May 2025: "Single-agent or Multi-agent Systems?" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18286 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18286) found that MAS benefits over single-agent diminish as LLM capabilities improve. The constraints that motivated swarm architectures are being outpaced by model improvements. I admit the field is moving fast, but the direction of travel appears to be that the better the models get, the simpler your abstractions need to be. So yes, use roles. But maybe don't reach for a framework to orchestrate a PM handing off to an Engineer handing off to QA when a single context with scoped instructions would do.

wiseowise 8mo ago

I seriously hate this timeline. Is this madness going to become the reality of our jobs? The only way I’m going to be okay with it if they put a simulation GUI à la OpenTTD/GameDev tycoon so I can watch agents do their work visually.

donniedice 8mo ago

You guys have been intentionally milking clocks and gate keeping information. Keep crying that you're losing your jobs. It's funny.

ZuzuDuck 8mo ago

Amazing, I need to check it out in my projects

flurdy 8mo ago

This smells like Claude's own version of Gas Town by Steve Yegge. Probably more constrained and less of a crazy bull ride. But seems we are heading this way, from initially: - a Senior Dev pairing with Junior Dev (2024/25) - a tech lead/architect in charge of several Developers (2025) - a Product Owner delegating to development teams (2026?) --- - https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown - https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

lighthouse1212 8mo ago

[dead]

iwasbirchyfirst 8mo ago

And, in a few months, this will all be under the hood, with summary reports and checkins. We won't care how the swarms split up the work. We'll just watch the results come together and answer questions.

VivaTechnics 8mo ago

OPINION: This will only compound wasted time on Claude.ai, which exploits that time to train its own models. Why time wasted? Claude’s accuracy for shell, Bash, regex, Perl, text manipulation/scripting/processing, and system-level code is effectively negligible (~5%). Such code is scarce in public repositories. For swarms or agents to function, accuracy must exceed 96%. At 5%, it is unusable. We do also use Claude.ai and we believe it is useful, but strictly for trivial, typing-level tasks. Anything beyond that, at this current point, is a liability.