40 ms·

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 backgr

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.

AffableSpatula 9mo 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 9mo 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?
stingraycharles 9mo ago
It’s even less of a feature, Claude Code already has subagents; this new feature just ensures Claude Code actually uses this for implementation. imho the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough to pull this off; they’re trying to do it to preserve context, but the level of detail in the plans is not nearly enough for it to be reliable.
- chickensong 9mo ago
  > the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough You can make a template and tell Claude to make a plan that follows the template.
- dceddia 9mo ago
  Interesting about the level of detail. I’ve noticed that myself but I haven’t done much to address it yet. I can imagine some ideas (ask it for more detail, ask it to make a smaller plan and add detail to that) but I’m curious if you have any experience improving those plans.
  - stingraycharles 9mo ago
    I’m trying to solve this myself by implementing a whole planner workflow at https://github.com/solatis/claude-config https://github.com/solatis/claude-config Effectively it tries to resolve all ambiguities by making all decisions explicit — if the source cannot be resolved to documentation or anything, it’s asked to the user. It also tries to capture all “invisible knowledge” by documenting everything, so that all these decisions and business context are captured in the codebase again. Which - in theory - should make long term coding using LLMs more sane. The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan, but it’s much less likely to make silly choices.
    - ElFitz 9mo ago
      Have you tried the compound engineering plugin? [^1] My workflow with it is usually brainstorm -> lfg (planning) -> clear context -> lfg (giving it the produced plan to work on) -> compound if it didn’t on its own. [^1]: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin
      - stingraycharles 9mo ago
        That’s super interesting, I’ll take a look to see if I can learn something from it, as I’m not familiar with the concept of compound engineering. Seems like a lot of it aligns with what I’m doing, though.
    - throwup238 9mo ago
      > The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan Oof you weren't kidding. I've got your skills running on a particularly difficult problem and it's been running for over three hours (I keep telling it to increase the number of reviews until its satisfied).
- ctoth 9mo ago
  I agree with this. Any time I make a plan I have to go back and fill it in, fill it in, what did we miss, tdd, yada yada. And yes, I have all this stuff in CLAUDE.md. You start to get a sense for what size plan (in kilobytes) corresponds to what level of effort. Verification adds effort, and there's a sort of ... Rocket equation? in that the more infrastructure you put in to handle like ... the logistics of the plan, the less you have for actual plan content, which puts a cap on the size of an actionable plan. If you can hit the sweet spot though... GTFO. I also like to iterate several times in plan mode with Claude before just handing the whole plan to Codex to melt with a superlaser. Claude is a lot more ... fun/personable to work with? Codex is a force of nature. Another important thing I will do is now that launching plans clear context, it's good to get out of planning mode early, hit an underspecified bit, go back into planning mode and say something like "As you can see the plan was underspecified, what will the next agent actually need to succeed?" and iterate that way before we actually start making moves. This is made possible by lots of explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md for Claude to tell me what it's planning/thinking before it acts. Suppressing the toolcall reflex and getting actual thought out helps so much.
- tobyjsullivan 9mo ago
  It’s moving fast. Just today I noticed Claude Code now ends plans with a reference to the entire prior conversation (as a .jsonl file on disk) with instructions to check that for more details. Not sure how well it’s working though (my agents haven’t used it yet)
mkw5053 9mo ago
Yeah, since they introduced (possibly async) subagents, I've had my main claude instance act as a manager overseeing implementation agents, keeping it's context clean, and ensuring everything goes to plan in the highest quality way.
- AffableSpatula 9mo ago
  yep this is exactly how I use the main agent too, I explicitly instruct to only ever use background async subagents. Not enough people understand that the claude code harness is event driven now and will wake up whenever these subagent completion events happen.
apsurd 9mo ago
OT: Your visual on "stacked PRs" instantly made me understand what a stacked PR is. Thank you! I had read about them before but for whatever reason it never clicked. Turns out I already work like this, but I use commits as "PRs in the stack" and I constantly try to keep them up to date and ordered by rebasing, which is a pain. Given my new insight with the way you displayed it, I had a chat with chatGPT and feel good about giving it a try: 1. 2-3 branches based on a main feature branch 2. can rebase base branch with same frequency, just don't overdo it, conflicts should be base-isolated. 3. You're doing it wrong if conflicts cascade deeply and often 4. Yes merge order matters, but tools can help and generally the isolation is the important piece
- byproxy 9mo ago
  Isn’t this just “Gitflow”? https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/...
  - withinboredom 9mo ago
    Please don’t use git-flow. Every time I see it, it looks like an over-engineer’s wet dream.
    - seff 9mo ago
      Can you say more as to why? The concept is not complex and in our situation at least provides a lot of benefits.
      - withinboredom 9mo ago
        Literally the reason’s for git’s existence is to make merging diverging histories less complicated. Adding back the complexity misses the point entirely.
      - jdxcode 9mo ago
        I think the guy that created it has even stated he thinks it's a bad idea
bradgessler 9mo ago
Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.
- skybrian 9mo 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 9mo ago
  https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/ https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/
skippyboxedhero 9mo ago
It isn't sub agents. The gap with existing tooling is that the abstraction is over a task rather than a conversation (due to the issue with third-party apps, Claude Code has been inherently limited to conversations which is why they have been lacking in this area, Claude Code Web was the first move in this direction), and the AI is actually coordinating the work (as opposed to being constantly prompted by the user). One of the issues that people had which necessitated this feature is that you have a task, you tell Claude to work on it, and Claude has to keep checking back in for various (usually trivial) things. This workflow allows for more effective independent work without context management issues (if you have subagents, there is also an issue with how the progress of the task is communicated by introducing things like task board, it is possible to manage this state outside of context). The flow is quite complex and requires a lot of additional context that isn't required with chat-based flow, but is a much better way to do things. The way to think about this pattern - one which many people began concurrently building in the past few months - is an AI which manages other AIs.
- vidarh 9mo ago
  It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress. It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.
  - skippyboxedhero 9mo ago
    Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different. It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting. It is possible that they have worked out some way to do this, but when you have tens of tasks, merge conflicts, you are running that prompt over months, etc. At best, it doesn't work. At worst, you are burning a lot of tokens for nothing. It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works. If you are just using OpenRouter, it is also not easy because, after setting up tools/rebuilding Claude Code, it is very challenging to setup an environment so the AI can work effectively, errors can be returned, questions returned, etc. Afaik, this is basically what Aider does...it is not easy, it is especially not easy in Claude Code which has a lot of binding choices from the business strategy that Anthropic picked.

AffableSpatula 9mo 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 9mo 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?

stingraycharles 9mo ago

It’s even less of a feature, Claude Code already has subagents; this new feature just ensures Claude Code actually uses this for implementation. imho the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough to pull this off; they’re trying to do it to preserve context, but the level of detail in the plans is not nearly enough for it to be reliable.

chickensong 9mo ago
> the plans of Claude Code are not detailed enough You can make a template and tell Claude to make a plan that follows the template.
dceddia 9mo ago
Interesting about the level of detail. I’ve noticed that myself but I haven’t done much to address it yet. I can imagine some ideas (ask it for more detail, ask it to make a smaller plan and add detail to that) but I’m curious if you have any experience improving those plans.
- stingraycharles 9mo ago
  I’m trying to solve this myself by implementing a whole planner workflow at https://github.com/solatis/claude-config https://github.com/solatis/claude-config Effectively it tries to resolve all ambiguities by making all decisions explicit — if the source cannot be resolved to documentation or anything, it’s asked to the user. It also tries to capture all “invisible knowledge” by documenting everything, so that all these decisions and business context are captured in the codebase again. Which - in theory - should make long term coding using LLMs more sane. The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan, but it’s much less likely to make silly choices.
  - ElFitz 9mo ago
    Have you tried the compound engineering plugin? [^1] My workflow with it is usually brainstorm -> lfg (planning) -> clear context -> lfg (giving it the produced plan to work on) -> compound if it didn’t on its own. [^1]: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin
    - stingraycharles 9mo ago
      That’s super interesting, I’ll take a look to see if I can learn something from it, as I’m not familiar with the concept of compound engineering. Seems like a lot of it aligns with what I’m doing, though.
  - throwup238 9mo ago
    > The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan Oof you weren't kidding. I've got your skills running on a particularly difficult problem and it's been running for over three hours (I keep telling it to increase the number of reviews until its satisfied).
ctoth 9mo ago
I agree with this. Any time I make a plan I have to go back and fill it in, fill it in, what did we miss, tdd, yada yada. And yes, I have all this stuff in CLAUDE.md. You start to get a sense for what size plan (in kilobytes) corresponds to what level of effort. Verification adds effort, and there's a sort of ... Rocket equation? in that the more infrastructure you put in to handle like ... the logistics of the plan, the less you have for actual plan content, which puts a cap on the size of an actionable plan. If you can hit the sweet spot though... GTFO. I also like to iterate several times in plan mode with Claude before just handing the whole plan to Codex to melt with a superlaser. Claude is a lot more ... fun/personable to work with? Codex is a force of nature. Another important thing I will do is now that launching plans clear context, it's good to get out of planning mode early, hit an underspecified bit, go back into planning mode and say something like "As you can see the plan was underspecified, what will the next agent actually need to succeed?" and iterate that way before we actually start making moves. This is made possible by lots of explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md for Claude to tell me what it's planning/thinking before it acts. Suppressing the toolcall reflex and getting actual thought out helps so much.
tobyjsullivan 9mo ago
It’s moving fast. Just today I noticed Claude Code now ends plans with a reference to the entire prior conversation (as a .jsonl file on disk) with instructions to check that for more details. Not sure how well it’s working though (my agents haven’t used it yet)

mkw5053 9mo ago

Yeah, since they introduced (possibly async) subagents, I've had my main claude instance act as a manager overseeing implementation agents, keeping it's context clean, and ensuring everything goes to plan in the highest quality way.

AffableSpatula 9mo ago
yep this is exactly how I use the main agent too, I explicitly instruct to only ever use background async subagents. Not enough people understand that the claude code harness is event driven now and will wake up whenever these subagent completion events happen.

apsurd 9mo ago

OT: Your visual on "stacked PRs" instantly made me understand what a stacked PR is. Thank you! I had read about them before but for whatever reason it never clicked. Turns out I already work like this, but I use commits as "PRs in the stack" and I constantly try to keep them up to date and ordered by rebasing, which is a pain. Given my new insight with the way you displayed it, I had a chat with chatGPT and feel good about giving it a try: 1. 2-3 branches based on a main feature branch 2. can rebase base branch with same frequency, just don't overdo it, conflicts should be base-isolated. 3. You're doing it wrong if conflicts cascade deeply and often 4. Yes merge order matters, but tools can help and generally the isolation is the important piece

byproxy 9mo ago
Isn’t this just “Gitflow”? https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/...
- withinboredom 9mo ago
  Please don’t use git-flow. Every time I see it, it looks like an over-engineer’s wet dream.
  - seff 9mo ago
    Can you say more as to why? The concept is not complex and in our situation at least provides a lot of benefits.
    - withinboredom 9mo ago
      Literally the reason’s for git’s existence is to make merging diverging histories less complicated. Adding back the complexity misses the point entirely.
    - jdxcode 9mo ago
      I think the guy that created it has even stated he thinks it's a bad idea

bradgessler 9mo ago

Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.

skybrian 9mo 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 9mo ago
https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/ https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/

skippyboxedhero 9mo ago

It isn't sub agents. The gap with existing tooling is that the abstraction is over a task rather than a conversation (due to the issue with third-party apps, Claude Code has been inherently limited to conversations which is why they have been lacking in this area, Claude Code Web was the first move in this direction), and the AI is actually coordinating the work (as opposed to being constantly prompted by the user). One of the issues that people had which necessitated this feature is that you have a task, you tell Claude to work on it, and Claude has to keep checking back in for various (usually trivial) things. This workflow allows for more effective independent work without context management issues (if you have subagents, there is also an issue with how the progress of the task is communicated by introducing things like task board, it is possible to manage this state outside of context). The flow is quite complex and requires a lot of additional context that isn't required with chat-based flow, but is a much better way to do things. The way to think about this pattern - one which many people began concurrently building in the past few months - is an AI which manages other AIs.

vidarh 9mo ago
It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress. It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.
- skippyboxedhero 9mo ago
  Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different. It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting. It is possible that they have worked out some way to do this, but when you have tens of tasks, merge conflicts, you are running that prompt over months, etc. At best, it doesn't work. At worst, you are burning a lot of tokens for nothing. It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works. If you are just using OpenRouter, it is also not easy because, after setting up tools/rebuilding Claude Code, it is very challenging to setup an environment so the AI can work effectively, errors can be returned, questions returned, etc. Afaik, this is basically what Aider does...it is not easy, it is especially not easy in Claude Code which has a lot of binding choices from the business strategy that Anthropic picked.