Comment by christofosho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christofosho | Hacker News Reader

I like reading these types of breakdowns. Really gives you ideas and insight into how others are approaching development with agents. I'm surprised the author hasn't broken down the developer agent persona into smaller subagents. There is a lot of context used when your agent needs to write in a larger breadth of code areas (i.e. database queries, tests, business logic, infrastructure, the general code skeleton). I've also read[1] that having a researcher and then a planner helps with context management in the pre-dev stage as well. I like his use of multiple reviewers, and am similarly surprised that they aren't refined into specialized roles.

I'll admit to being a "one prompt to rule them all" developer, and will not let a chat go longer than the first input I give. If mistakes are made, I fix the system prompt or the input prompt and try again. And I make sure the work is broken down as much as possible. That means taking the time to do some discovery before I hit send.

Is anyone else using many smaller specific agents? What types of patterns are you employing? TIA

1. https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...

that reference you give is pretty dated now, based on a talk from August which is the Beforetimes of the newer models that have given such a step change in productivity.

The key change I've found is really around orchestration - as TFA says, you don't run the prompt yourself. The orchestrator runs the whole thing. It gets you to talk to the architect/planner, then the output of that plan is sent to another agent, automatically. In his case he's using an architect, a developer, and some reviewers. I've been using a Superpowers-based [0] orchestration system, which runs a brainstorm, then a design plan, then an implementation plan, then some devs, then some reviewers, and loops back to the implementation plan to check progress and correctness.

It's actually fun. I've been coding for 40+ years now, and I'm enjoying this :)

[0] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Can you bolt superpowers onto an existing project so that it uses the approach going forward (I'm using Opencode), or would that get too messy?

Yes. But gsd is even better - especially gsd2

looks interesting, thanks for the tip :)

These are just skills, so you can add the skills to your setup and start using them whenever you like.

Thanks

I don't think that splitting into subagents that use the same model will really help. I need to clarify this in the post, but the split is 1) so I can use Sonnet to code and save on some tokens and 2) so I can get other models to review, to get a different perspective.

It seems to me that splitting into subagents that use the same model is kind of like asking a person to wear three different hats and do three different parts of the job instead of just asking them to do it all with one hat. You're likely to get similar results.

I'm considering using subagents, as a way to manage context and delegate "simple" tasks to cheaper models (if you want to see tokens burn, watch Opus try fixing a misplaced ')' in a Lisp file!).

I see what you mean w.r.t. different hats; but is it useful to have different tools available? For example, a "planner" having Web access and read-only file access, versus a "developer" having write access to files but no Web access?

Yes, if you want to separate capabilities, definitely.

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