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Comment by code_biologist | Hacker News Reader

I'm having bad results with SotA models. Some questions, if you're up for it:

In your workflow, who implements the review feedback - the review subagent or the code-writing-subagent?

Do have a baseline styleguide (like Google's Go style guide) for the review subagents, or is it entirely the subjective things and specific corrections? I remember 6 months ago it seemed like piling general "good taste" code advice into AGENTS.md was considered bad.

Do you move between harnesses or have you gone all in on claude? I've bounced between claude/codex/omp, maybe to my detriment.

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> In your workflow, who implements the review feedback - the review subagent or the code-writing-subagent?

I think currently my orchestrator - which spins up subagents for impl, research, review, fixes, etc.

I've been working with a single orchestrator per "project" or "feature" or whatever sort of "thing I'm paying attention to" is (I guess...chat?) and that orchestrator is told to use subagents to do any/all of this type of stuff, it's sole purpose is to just communicate with me, instantiate these types of 'work', and tell me about results or ask for input.

I am just now considering changing this though and considering something even heavier, but for the purpose of "cleaning up / polishing" lazy work by a single pass of "build thing X", this sort of orchestrator with an AGENTS.md or skill that says "always do a review pass after you finish a task by spinning up N sequential (or parallel) follow up subagents to review and another M parallel or sequential fix subagents to 'fix' those things should make a meaningful difference, if a person sees the same types of traps that their model falls into repeatedly.

You don't even need to have some complex harness. Just take a stock frontier model and its default cli or harness, ask it to edit its agents file to tell itself to always work in this manner, and you're done.

I just wanted to thank you for the followup and the clarity on your pattern. So many people say "it's working great for me" without explaining how they go beyond "tell claude to implement feature".

Not asking for answers to these questions, just frustration dumping:

The biggest things I've struggled with are models having taste. For spec writing I was having a lot of issues with them making statements that were interpretable in a superposition of ways, eg "we'll do XYZ with entities that support and need it" when there's 3 possible entities and the model hand-waved at exactly the wrong tokens.

I added AGENTS.md guidance + memories to be unambiguous (with short but good examples) and "no coined shorthand". Now I'm getting a marked increase in specificity, but it's places that don't matter (claude explaining existing code to itself). I'm having difficulty controlling the spew of new text, but feature writing/research still gets fuzzy and lazy around the difficult underspecified aspects of the problem/feature.

Do I just keep dumping examples into reviewer subagent context and have them rewrite and simplify the research subagent spew?

I repeatedly have "Risks and gotchas" sections have a whole paragraph dedicated to things that don't matter, and then a single sentence bullet point that's actually a huge problem when I dig into it.

Do I have a generic hook to make subagents to review bullet points and size them commensurate with impact? If I tell them to "have taste", do they have taste?

I'm just trying to get good code done. I hate these things.

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