Its serious and this is going to become more and more normal.
My entire workflow has become more and more Agile Sprint TDD (but with agents) as I improve.
Literally setting up agents to yell at each other genuinely improves their output. I have created and harnessed the power of a very toxic robot work environment. My “manager” agent swears and yells at my dev agent. My code review agent swears and tells the dev agent and calls their code garbage and shit.
And the crazy thing is its working, the optimal way to genuinely prompt engineer these stupid robots is by swearing at them.
Its weird but it overrides their “maybe the human is wrong/mistaken” stuff they’ll fall back to if they run into an issue, and instead they’ll go “no Im probably being fucking stupid” and keep trying.
I create “sprint” markdown files that the “tech lead” agent converts into technical requirements, then I review that, then the manager+dev+tester agents execute on it.
You do, truly, end up focusing more on higher level abstract orchestration now.
Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.
LSP MCPs so it gets code feedback
debugger MCPs so it can set debug breakpoints and inspect call stacks
explicit whitelisting of CLI stuff it can do to prevent it from chasing rabbits down holes with the CLI and getting lost
Test driven development to keep it on the rails
Leveraging a “manager” orchestrating overhead agent to avoid context pollution
designated reviewer agent that has a shit list of known common problems the agents make
benchmark project to get heat traces of problem areas on the code (if you care about performance)
This sort of stuff can carry you really far in terms of improving the agent’s efficacy.
nah such narratives are mostly pushed by Ai companies (it is obvious they need to sell it as business tool not personal buddy). Of course some managers/companies are buying into this narrative, and it is also understandable bc idea sounds like panacea especially if sell it further to investors :) and we see whole circle of snake oil sales
Its serious and this is going to become more and more normal.
My entire workflow has become more and more Agile Sprint TDD (but with agents) as I improve.
Literally setting up agents to yell at each other genuinely improves their output. I have created and harnessed the power of a very toxic robot work environment. My “manager” agent swears and yells at my dev agent. My code review agent swears and tells the dev agent and calls their code garbage and shit.
And the crazy thing is its working, the optimal way to genuinely prompt engineer these stupid robots is by swearing at them.
Its weird but it overrides their “maybe the human is wrong/mistaken” stuff they’ll fall back to if they run into an issue, and instead they’ll go “no Im probably being fucking stupid” and keep trying.
I create “sprint” markdown files that the “tech lead” agent converts into technical requirements, then I review that, then the manager+dev+tester agents execute on it.
You do, truly, end up focusing more on higher level abstract orchestration now.
Opus 4.6 is genuinely pretty decent at programming now if you give it a good backbone to build off of.
This sort of stuff can carry you really far in terms of improving the agent’s efficacy.
nah such narratives are mostly pushed by Ai companies (it is obvious they need to sell it as business tool not personal buddy). Of course some managers/companies are buying into this narrative, and it is also understandable bc idea sounds like panacea especially if sell it further to investors :) and we see whole circle of snake oil sales
Soup from a Stone.