6 ms·

Who Does What? Team Topologies for the Agentic Platform

45 points by owulveryck 3mo ago

n0us 3mo ago
The complexity was real, and honestly that’s a good callout
- jonners00 3mo ago
  I just came here to post that I couldn't read past 'The complexity was real, but distributed'. I can get past these LLM constructions when Claude uses them in chat. They seriously undermine the credibility of comment pieces or guides like this one when I encounter them. I absolutely hate it when I get them in a lengthy response to a simple question to a colleague about why we're going to do something a particular way.
  - smcleod 3mo ago
    It's sort of a form of corrective antithesis (or "negation-antithesis") I think. A bit like "it's not x, it's why". Really grinds my gears.
  - AdamN 3mo ago
    [flagged]
yapadog 3mo ago
With all the roles and harnessing and boiler plate, it kind of makes me wonder if we shouldn't just spend a year or two doing genuinely good software development and then everything trained on it would be good by default?
- AdamN 3mo ago
  lol - it's probably going to just get worse. AI will continue to generate ghetto code and nobody cares so it will just degrade even further.
pydry 3mo ago
Every time I read in some blog about an unproven technique which is profitable for token sellers I'm reminded of those overpriced restaurants that became "instagram popular" because the cool kids got paid a bundle of money to promote them. In real life the only time I saw somebody try this "multiagentic coding" the results were...underwhelming.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- zihotki 3mo ago
  In real life only a minority of teams achieved good results according to Circle CI report. And there is one notable anecdotal source proving that it is possible - https://ideas.fin.ai/p/2x-nine-months-later https://ideas.fin.ai/p/2x-nine-months-later
  - Ecstatify 3mo ago
    Regarding your link I'd question any blog post written by a CTO. This is just fodder for their next job. "Productivity is the efficiency with which resources (like time, labor, and capital) are converted into useful goods and services" So they increased productivity "number of PRs". Shipping more does not guarantee shipping better or more impactful features. Many orgs are constrained by product decisions, not engineering speed. If there was so much value to unlock through AI then why did Intercom/Fin sell to Salesforce? ref: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-fin https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/sa...
- owulveryck 3mo ago
  (Op here) I genuinely think that multi-agent is a probable future to enable coding at the scale of a big corporation. I agree and I did not see it work yet, but the trial were most likely on small scale where it is simply over engineering. (Btw : I do not sell tokens. I I think distributed the work through agents in a plateform is a way to control costs by optimizing specialised agents)
nilirl 3mo ago
The 'reading effort : meaning' ratio of this post is a bit painful. There are about 3 named concepts in every paragraph. There are about 15 claims about named concept being the solution to a problem that's never explained. At some point, if you try to make 20 different points, you make no point at all.
- mathgeek 3mo ago
  It's got all the indicators of being AI generated, so really not surprising at all. I lost track of how many "this, not that" and "this, but also" within a few paragraphs. LLMs tend to prefer sounding clever over simple terminology.
  - thirtygeo 3mo ago
    Same - I can sense the value here and I can see how I can transfer some of the ideas to my team (based on the image), but the volume of text diarrhea made me realise "this person took the lazy way out and didn't create something for their audience". I stopped reading at second paragraph. What I mean to say is that AI ghost writing is fine (I see the comment by the author). Deciding not to read poorly written content is also fine (and there's a reason why writing style has been discussed as long as the printed page has existed). With the speed at which HN readers can identify mass produced, AI-generated word salad, it is insightful to look at a what users aren't able to stand back from their outputs and view them from the intended audience perspective
  - tomrod 3mo ago
    Absolutely
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    no, you're misinterpreting what its doing. It's not... Yes, what it's doing is using continuation phrases. It wants to continue, and these token-combos, like Tekken 4, let it move from one gradient descent to the next, and like Tony Hawk, perform combo after combo, so it can just keep producing tokens. Because thats how they're trained. In another thread, someone wished they'd taught the models "I dont know" and were extremely convinced that some how you could train a model to stop producing tokens, or whatever. You can't both train the model to generate output and also teach it not to. That's their whole bag of tricks. But it's not trying to be clever, it's trying to keep generating.
cheekygeeky 3mo ago
[flagged]
throwaway91827 3mo ago
"Building an application used to mean orchestrating roles over time: one person designed, another challenged the architecture, a third tested, a fourth deployed." What? That's not my experience at all, this lost me very quickly.
- herodoturtle 3mo ago
  I agree with you. I'm sure the author means well, but it comes off as someone who lacks real-world experience sharing what they think is an ideal team structure when building apps. That's just my opinion, but yeah, the article doesn't resonate with my experience at all, and I've been at this a while.
  - adammarples 3mo ago
    It's written by a large language model, I wouldn't expect it to mean anything
- wesselbindt 3mo ago
  It reveals the exact type of mindset that could produce an article like this. All they know is waterfall, so they see agentic coding and think: "you know what we need? More waterfall"
tirrellp 3mo ago
Please fix your writing and make it more user friendly to the users you want to read it. As of now, it reads like unedited AI slop.
- penetrarthur 3mo ago
  I actually think it is people who write using these terrible short punchline sentences. In my experience, llms do better job at generating complicated sentences.

45 points by owulveryck 3mo ago

n0us 3mo ago

The complexity was real, and honestly that’s a good callout

jonners00 3mo ago
I just came here to post that I couldn't read past 'The complexity was real, but distributed'. I can get past these LLM constructions when Claude uses them in chat. They seriously undermine the credibility of comment pieces or guides like this one when I encounter them. I absolutely hate it when I get them in a lengthy response to a simple question to a colleague about why we're going to do something a particular way.
- smcleod 3mo ago
  It's sort of a form of corrective antithesis (or "negation-antithesis") I think. A bit like "it's not x, it's why". Really grinds my gears.
- AdamN 3mo ago
  [flagged]

yapadog 3mo ago

With all the roles and harnessing and boiler plate, it kind of makes me wonder if we shouldn't just spend a year or two doing genuinely good software development and then everything trained on it would be good by default?

AdamN 3mo ago
lol - it's probably going to just get worse. AI will continue to generate ghetto code and nobody cares so it will just degrade even further.

pydry 3mo ago

Every time I read in some blog about an unproven technique which is profitable for token sellers I'm reminded of those overpriced restaurants that became "instagram popular" because the cool kids got paid a bundle of money to promote them. In real life the only time I saw somebody try this "multiagentic coding" the results were...underwhelming.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
zihotki 3mo ago
In real life only a minority of teams achieved good results according to Circle CI report. And there is one notable anecdotal source proving that it is possible - https://ideas.fin.ai/p/2x-nine-months-later https://ideas.fin.ai/p/2x-nine-months-later
- Ecstatify 3mo ago
  Regarding your link I'd question any blog post written by a CTO. This is just fodder for their next job. "Productivity is the efficiency with which resources (like time, labor, and capital) are converted into useful goods and services" So they increased productivity "number of PRs". Shipping more does not guarantee shipping better or more impactful features. Many orgs are constrained by product decisions, not engineering speed. If there was so much value to unlock through AI then why did Intercom/Fin sell to Salesforce? ref: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-fin https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/sa...
owulveryck 3mo ago
(Op here) I genuinely think that multi-agent is a probable future to enable coding at the scale of a big corporation. I agree and I did not see it work yet, but the trial were most likely on small scale where it is simply over engineering. (Btw : I do not sell tokens. I I think distributed the work through agents in a plateform is a way to control costs by optimizing specialised agents)

nilirl 3mo ago

The 'reading effort : meaning' ratio of this post is a bit painful. There are about 3 named concepts in every paragraph. There are about 15 claims about named concept being the solution to a problem that's never explained. At some point, if you try to make 20 different points, you make no point at all.

mathgeek 3mo ago
It's got all the indicators of being AI generated, so really not surprising at all. I lost track of how many "this, not that" and "this, but also" within a few paragraphs. LLMs tend to prefer sounding clever over simple terminology.
- thirtygeo 3mo ago
  Same - I can sense the value here and I can see how I can transfer some of the ideas to my team (based on the image), but the volume of text diarrhea made me realise "this person took the lazy way out and didn't create something for their audience". I stopped reading at second paragraph. What I mean to say is that AI ghost writing is fine (I see the comment by the author). Deciding not to read poorly written content is also fine (and there's a reason why writing style has been discussed as long as the printed page has existed). With the speed at which HN readers can identify mass produced, AI-generated word salad, it is insightful to look at a what users aren't able to stand back from their outputs and view them from the intended audience perspective
- tomrod 3mo ago
  Absolutely
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  no, you're misinterpreting what its doing. It's not... Yes, what it's doing is using continuation phrases. It wants to continue, and these token-combos, like Tekken 4, let it move from one gradient descent to the next, and like Tony Hawk, perform combo after combo, so it can just keep producing tokens. Because thats how they're trained. In another thread, someone wished they'd taught the models "I dont know" and were extremely convinced that some how you could train a model to stop producing tokens, or whatever. You can't both train the model to generate output and also teach it not to. That's their whole bag of tricks. But it's not trying to be clever, it's trying to keep generating.

cheekygeeky 3mo ago

[flagged]

throwaway91827 3mo ago

"Building an application used to mean orchestrating roles over time: one person designed, another challenged the architecture, a third tested, a fourth deployed." What? That's not my experience at all, this lost me very quickly.

herodoturtle 3mo ago
I agree with you. I'm sure the author means well, but it comes off as someone who lacks real-world experience sharing what they think is an ideal team structure when building apps. That's just my opinion, but yeah, the article doesn't resonate with my experience at all, and I've been at this a while.
- adammarples 3mo ago
  It's written by a large language model, I wouldn't expect it to mean anything
wesselbindt 3mo ago
It reveals the exact type of mindset that could produce an article like this. All they know is waterfall, so they see agentic coding and think: "you know what we need? More waterfall"

tirrellp 3mo ago

Please fix your writing and make it more user friendly to the users you want to read it. As of now, it reads like unedited AI slop.

penetrarthur 3mo ago
I actually think it is people who write using these terrible short punchline sentences. In my experience, llms do better job at generating complicated sentences.