4 ms·

Sub agent also helps a lot in that regard. Have an agent do the planning, have an implementation agent do the code and have another one do the review. Clear res

• jalopy 8mo ago
  This sounds very promising. Any link to more details?
• antonvs 8mo ago
  Since the phases are sequential, what’s the benefit of a sub agent vs just sequential prompts to the same agent? Just orchestration?
  • edmundsauto 8mo ago
    Context pollution, I think. Just because something is sequential in a context file doesn’t mean it’ll happen sequentially, but if you use subagents there is a separation of concerns. I also feel like one bloated context window feels a little sloppy in the execution (and costs more in tokens). YMMV, I’m still figuring this stuff out
• drivebyhooting 8mo ago
  This runs counter to the advice in the fine article: one long continuous session building context.
• hinkley 7mo ago
  A huge part of getting autonomy as a human is demonstrating that you can be trusted to police your own decisions up to a point that other people can reason about. Some people get more autonomy than others because they can be trusted with more things. All of these models are kinda toys as long as you have to manually send a minder in to deal with their bullshit. If we can do it via agents, then the vendors can bake it in, and they haven't. Which is just another judgement call about how much autonomy you give to someone who clearly isn't policing their own decisions and thus is untrustworthy. If we're at the start of the Trough of Disillusionment now, which maybe we are and maybe we aren't, that'll be part of the rebound that typically follows the trough. But the Trough is also typically the end of the mountains of VC cash, so the costs per use goes up which can trigger aftershocks.
• synergy20 7mo ago
  I think claude-code is doing this at the background now
• vincentvandeth 7mo ago
  This approach sounds clean in theory, but in production you're building a black box. When your planning agent hands off to an implementation agent and that hands off to a review agent — where did the bug originate? Which agent's context was polluted? Good luck tracing that. I went the opposite direction: single agent per task, strict quality gates between steps, full execution logs. No sub-agents. Every decision is traceable to one context window. The governance layer (PR gates, staged rollouts, acceptance criteria) does the work that people expect sub-agents to do — but with actual observability. After 6 months in production and 1100+ learned patterns: fewer moving parts, better debugging, more reliable output. Built a full production crawler this way — 26 extractors, 405 tests — without sub-agents. Orchestrator acts as gatekeeper that redispatches uncompleted work.
  • gck1 7mo ago
    > Every decision is traceable to one context window There are no models that can do all the mentioned steps in a single usable context window. This is why subagents or multi-agent orchestrators exist in the first place.
    • vincentvandeth 7mo ago
      You're right that no model handles everything in one context window — that's exactly why I built context rotation. Each task runs in a single agent context (one responsibility, clear scope), and when the window fills up, the system automatically rotates: writes a structured handover, clears, and resumes in a fresh window. The key distinction: sub-agents run within a parent context with shared state (black box). My approach uses independent parallel agents (separate terminals, separate context windows) that report back to an orchestrator. Large tasks get split into smaller dispatches upfront — each scoped to fit a single context window. The orchestrator can dispatch research to 3 agents in parallel, collect their outputs, then dispatch a synthesis task to a single agent that merges the findings. So it's not "one context window for everything" — it's right-sized tasks with full observability per agent, and a governance layer managing the sequence and merging results.
      • 7mo ago