41 pointsby kadharmfn4 hours ago7 comments
  • bob10293 hours ago
    Sub agents are significantly more useful than multi agents.

    Wrap a nested prompt with a tool call that is invoked by the caller prompt. That is the answer to all your suffering. You can repeat this for as many layers of invocation as you desire. You can layer determinism and non-determinism as much as you like in whatever orders you see fit with additional alignment, retry policies, logging, etc.

    Agents running concurrently will not go any faster than one well-designed hierarchical agent system.

    Imagine the simple task of incrementing a global counter. That would be my #1 benchmark. If you can demonstrate a MAS can increment that counter faster than a single agent can (monotonically without skipping), then I will happily delete 100% of the AI-related code I've authored and start over using your ideas.

    • vielite131010 minutes ago
      Agree on this. I have been using oh-my-pi and subagents just works for me.

      I have never see a case where I need multi-agents talking to each others or something

    • gbnwl2 hours ago
      What harness are you using? In both Claude Code and Codex I run into the issue of subagents being unable to dispatch their own subagents, so I haven't been able to play with "many layers of invocation".
      • bob1029an hour ago
        Custom harness, custom tools.

        With custom we don't have to disclose to the caller that the implementation of the tool is another LLM. Each piece of deterministic tool code can firewall the perspective of the model as appropriate.

        Think of a sub agent as being isomorphic with a tool call.

    • dominotw3 hours ago
      depends on what type of problem it is
      • bob10292 hours ago
        I am curious if we have any examples of problems that can only be solved via multiple concurrent prompts coordinating in real time.
    • alala-lala-lon2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • phainopepla22 hours ago
    Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but when I open up a page that was obviously created by Claude, I just close it again.
    • KellyCriterion2 hours ago
      TBH, this one is an example of the rather good bucket, Id say?

      I have seen much much worse examples on corporate blogs for example, where I question if authors even understand how to use any publishing system and how colors & info architecture works :-D

      • l9oan hour ago
        haha I agree that the information seems well laid out in this case, but the "Anthropic terracotta" is waaay too overused nowadays
  • FLeXMurphy31 minutes ago
    I remember all these topics being discussed... well over 25 years ago, though I'm sure they are much older than that.
  • cush2 hours ago
    Does anyone else open sites with this default claude code theme and immediately close them?
  • nzjrs7 minutes ago
    Slop
  • empath752 hours ago
    If you leave "The Honest Summary" in anything Claude wrote, I am not going to read any of it, shows a complete lack of care or interest in what you are doing.

    I don't care if you are having Claude write something for you, but I feel like I spent more time writing these two sentences than this person put into this post.

    • scubboan hour ago
      My opinion has shifted over the last few months. Instead of valuing effort put into "putting words together", I am trying to judge the value that I get _from_ the words[0].

      I'm reminded of a passage in Stephen Fry's "The Liar"[1], which draws the distinction between a book as an object of art, and a book as a vehicle for communication. If the message is worthwhile, I don't care if it was blurted out by a model or if blind monks inscribed it by hand into vellum parchment.

      Don't get me wrong, there's certainly correlation - if I _know_ you've taken a lot of effort to write something, the chances are good that there is worthwhile content being communicated. But the correlation is _not_ perfect.

      [0] when it comes to technical writing that intends to communicate information. Narrative writing that intends to evoke an emotion or viewpoint is a different story!

      [1] https://blog.scubbo.org/posts/books-as-vehicles/

      • ClaraForm6 minutes ago
        The problem is there's no signal for the recipient that the value being delivered aligns with the intention of the human who set the prompting chain into action, right?

        If an AI auto-outputs something with no sign of final check-off by a human, we don't even know if the intention of the human is to spam 100 different articles and delete 99 based on perceived success, or if the AI actually helped them translate something worth saying.

        edit: One might argue that value and intention should be kept separate, but clear intention is also an indicator of value, and these days there are dozens of sources of material. It's very easy to "talk" at the void, and very difficult to figure out where to "listen". If an author doesn't try to make "listening" easier, then it puts the value they hold into question if they don't care about it enough themselves.

      • goosejuice19 minutes ago
        Beyond that, criticism based on a simplistic aversion to the mere usage of an LLM can be ablelist. I think few of us want to give our own time to things others didn't invest time in, but how do you really know why the reader used an llm, or even if they did, at a surface level?

        There's obviously no obligation to read someone else's shit, but there's no obligation to criticize it without context either. Why not criticize the content instead of the assumed methods?

  • kadharmfn4 hours ago
    [flagged]