This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works.
I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.
I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.
It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.
Likely I am missing something. This is just my gut reaction as someone who has definitely not mastered using agents. Would love to hear from anyone that has a similar workflow where there is high parallelism.
My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code".
I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay area because of the importance of working in an office to reduce communication hurdles. But if I can really 10x my current productivity, I can get the power of a seed series startup with even less communication overhead (I could also get by with much less capital). Imagine being able to hire 10 reliable junior-mid engineers who unquestionably followed your instruction and didn't need to sleep. This is what I keep being told we have for $200/month. Forget not needing engineers, why do we need angel investors or even early stage VC? A single smart engineer should be able, if all the claims I'm hearing are true, to easily accomplish in months what used to take years.
But I keep seeing products shipped at the same speed but with a $200 per month per user overhead. Honestly I would love to be wrong on this because that would be incredibly cool. But unfortunately I'm not seeing it yet.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this.
I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a consideration that if they advertise their 1 eng status and success, it might attract other competitors or the customers might think they can do it themselves (maybe possible, but not for 95% of them since some tech know how is still required) or customers would see it as a business risk.
All 3 have blown me away with what they are doing. All 3 have real, paying customers. (They occasionally reach out for some higher order architecture questions)
So true, as a mere software developer on a payroll: I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks )))) And when I work on my hobby project - having one AI agent crawling around my codebase is like watching a baby in a glassware shop. 10 babies? no thanks!
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
After months of hearing that people are producing software in months that would normally take years, the best examples of vibe coded software I've seen look like they would normally take months, not years. If you don't care how they're built or how long it took (which a user generally doesn't), much of the remaining shine comes off.
If I'm wrong, I'd love to see it. A genuinely big piece of software produced entirely (or near entirely?) with AI that would've normally taken talented engineers years to build.
I do stuff in my free time now that would have been a full time job a year ago. Accomplishing in months what would have taken years. (And doing in days what would have taken weeks.) I'm talking about actually built-out products with a decent amount of code and features, not basic prototypes. I feel like the vibe is "put up or shut up", so check out my bio for one example.
I think your logic goes wrong because you assume that more productivity implies less desire for engineers. But now engineers are maybe 2x or 5x more productive than before. So that makes them more attractive to hire than before. It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool. It's like if new pickaxes were invented that let your gold miners dig 5x more gold. You'd see an explosion in gold miners, not a reduction. For another example, I spend all my free time coding now because I can do so much now. I get so much more result for the same effort, that it makes sense to put more effort in.
And to push this example further, if you can hire 10 developers each commanding 10 reliable junior-mid developers you have a team of 100, which is probably more than enough to build basically any software project in existence. WhatsApp was built with way less than that.
They are absolutely crushing it. I know of a one-man shop that just got notice they were selected for an eight-figure revenue contract. They would NEVER go public with their head count or their product being built by AI.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups
Oh, man, they're just waiting for their poster boy to show up. Once first unicorn "built by a single person" pops up you'll regret having a single social network account.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Who should be seeing that? The thing about 1 person startups is that it requires little to no communication to start up, and also very little capital. Seems easy to fly below the radar.
Also "a ton", idk. Doing a startup is still hard, for reasons outside of just being able to write a lot of code. In my experience churning out all this code at 10x is coming with a significant complexity tax: Turns out writing code and thinking about code problems was the relaxing part. When that goes away you have to think about real world problems only. What a fucking mess.
Still, I would assume that it's more of a thing now, and something you could observe when you have YC data for example. Do we know that's not the case? I am in no position to say, one way or the other.
My favorite movie quote as it pertains to software engineering has for a long time been Jurassic Park's: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
That’s how I feel about a lot of AI-powered development. Just because you can have 10 parallel agents cranking out features 24/7 and have AI write 100% of the code, that doesn’t mean you’re actually building a product that users want and/or that is a viable business.
I’m currently in this situation, working on a greenfield project as founder/solo dev. Yes, AI has been tremendously useful in speeding things up, especially in patching over smaller knowledge gaps of mine.
But in the end, as in all the projects before in my career, building the MVP has rarely been the hard part of starting a company.
My brother is selling a CRM he developed for his business to others for a couple thousand a month.
There is no way he would have built the CRM as quickly pre-AI.
He built, in a few months, what would have taken maybe one to two years before.
It's probably going to be a while before someone builds the next Instagram with AI. But I think that's more a function of product fit and idea. Less so how fast one person can code.
The first billion-dollar solopreneur likely is going to happen at some point, but it's still a one-in-a-million shot, no matter how fast a person can code.
Look at how many startups fail despite plenty of money for programmers.
But I am seeing friends get to revenue faster with AI on small ideas.
A lot of people either a) don’t know about the good tools or b) aren’t using them enough/properly.
There is a ton of anti-AI sentiment, and not all LLMs are equal. There is a lot of individual adoption that is yet to occur.
I know at least two startups that are one person or two people that are punching way above their weight due to this force multiplier. I don’t think it’s industry-wide yet, but it will be relatively soon.
If all of this really worked, Claude Code would not be a buggy, slow, frustratingly limited, and overall poorly written application. It can't even reload a "plugin" at runtime. Something that native code plugin hosts have been doing since plugins existed, where it's actually hard to do.
Claude Plugins are a couple `.md` file references, some `/command` handler registrations, and a few other pieces of trivial state. There's not a lot there, but you have to restart the whole damn app to install or update one.
Plus, there's the **ing terminal refresh bug they haven't managed to fix over the past year. Maybe put a team of 30 code agents on that. If I sound bitter, it's because the model itself is genuinely very good. I've just been stuck for a very long time working with it through Claude Code.
> I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay area because of the importance of working in an office to reduce communication hurdles.
This is toxic behavior by these companies, and is not backed by any empirical data that I’ve ever seen. It should be shunned and called out.
As far as the remainder of your post, I think you’ve uncovered solid evidence that the abilities of LLMs to code on their own, without human planning, architecting, and constant correction, is significantly oversold by most of the companies pushing the tech.
I got laid off in the first half of 2025 and decided to use my severance to see if I could go full-time with my side project. Over the last six months I've gone from zero to about $200k in ARR, and 75% of that was in the last three months. My average customer is paying about $250 / month.
I have zero help, I do everything myself: coding, design, marketing, sales, etc. The product uses AI to replace humans in a niche industry, so the core of the product is AI, but I also increasingly build it with AI. I rarely code manually these days, I'm just riding herd on agents, often in between sales calls, dealing with customer support, etc. I may eventually hire a VA-type person to help with admin and customer support stuff where it changes often enough that it's not worth it to build an AI workflow for, but even there...I don't know. If we get reliable computer use models in 2026 or 2027, I probably won't ever hire anyone.
I've never talked openly in tech circles about this product, nor will I. The technical challenges are non-trivial, so I don't think it'd be easy to replicate for another engineer, but my competitors are all dinosaurs and getting customers to switch to me is incredibly easy. The last thing I need is another engineer spinning up a competitor.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Too early. Wait a year. People are just coming to grips how to really make these agents make good changes and large enough changes to really start accelerating.
Also, expect a number of those startups to be entirely stealth and wait longer to raise, as well as maybe in many cases be more fleeting and/or far more fast moving (having to totally re-invent what they're doing at a pace you wouldn't expect to before).
I've been full in on this for 2 years now, and I'm only just at the stage where I feel my setups and model capabilities are intersecting to produce results good enough that I've started testing if one project I'm working on will actually manage to generate revenue.
I'm not going to tell you what it is, because if I did there's too little moat and HN is crawling with great people who could probably replicate it and execute on it faster than me, and Claude is capable of doing all the heavy lifting entirely by itself - that in itself is what makes it potentially viable -, so sorry for being vauge.
If it shows signs of generating revenue, it'll be so cheap to scale because of Claude, that I'll be able scale it far before I need to raise any capital.
But other people will figure it out, most likely other people are already doing the same thing.
As a result I have a short window, and it likely will close as model improvements will make it more and more trivial to do what I'm trying to do, so my approach is to try to extract as much return as I can in as little time as I can, hoping there isn't yet too much competition, and then move on.
This last part will also limit - a lot of people just won't be able to move fast enough (I might not have), and so a lot of these "one person startups" won't ever become visible because they won't even get to a stage where people are ready to talk about it.
In this case, it is easily measurable how much time Claude has saved me, because I've done the same thing before, manually, and made money from it, and the fastest turnaround I've achieved before was 21 days. So far, my first test run with Claude + me in the loop produced the same quality in 3 days, my second in 2 days, my third 12 hours, and I think I can drive it down towards 1-2 hours of my time, with me being the blocker to speeding it up beyond that.
At 21 days it wasn't really profitable. At 1-2 days it "should be" wildly profitable unless I'm already too late. If I can get it down to an hour or two of my time, then I'd also be able to hire to scale it further with good margin, and the question is just finding the sweet spot.
This opportunity will never be a unicorn, but there's a lot of money there if you don't need to raise, and the cost of scaling it to the sweet spot where I maximise my returns is something I should be able to finance without outside money the moment I validate that the unit economics are right.
You might not hear about this "one person startup" again until it either has failed and I decide to tell the story, or it's succeeded but the opportunity has closed and I've made what I can make from it. I suspect there will be many cases like mine that you'll never hear about at all.
(and yes, I realise a lot of people will just dismiss this as bullshit because I won't give details; that's fine)
I hope self-promotion isn't frowned upon, but I've been spending the past months figuring out a workflow [1] that helps tackle the "more complicated problems" and ensure long-term maintainability of projects when done purely through Claude Code.
Effectively, I try to:
- Do not allow the LLM to make any implicit decisions, but instead confirm with the user.
- Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs;
- Capture all "invisible knowledge" around decisions and architecture that's difficult to infer from code alone.
It's based entirely on Claude Code sub-agents + skills. The skills almost all invoke a Python script that guides the agents through workflows.
It's not a fast workflow: it frequently takes more than 1 hour just for the planning phase. Execution is significantly faster, as (typically) most issues have been discovered during the planning phase already (otherwise it would be considered a bug and I'd improve the workflow based on that).
I'm under the impression that the creator of Claude Code's post is also intended to raise awareness of certain features of Claude Code, such as hand-offs to the cloud and back. Their workflow only works for small features. It reads a bit like someone took a “best practices” guide and turned it into a twitter post. Nice, but not nearly detailed enough for an actual workflow.
> Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs;
> Capture all "invisible knowledge" around decisions and architecture that's difficult to infer from code alone.
I work on projects where people love to create all sorts of complex abstractions but also hate writing ADRs (so they don’t) or often any sorts of comments and when they do they’re not very well written. Like the expectation is that you should call and ask the person who wrote something or have a multi-hour meeting where you make decisions and write nothing down.
That sort of environment is only conductive to manual work, dear reader, avoid those. Heed the advice above about documenting stuff.
> Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs
Over the summer last year, I had the AI (Gemini Pro 2.5) write base libraries from scratch that area easy for itself to write code against. Now GPro3 can one-shot (with, at most, a single debug loop at the REPL) 100% of the normal code I need developed (back office/business-type code).
Huge productivity booster, there are a few things that are very easy for humans to do that AI struggles with. By removing them, the AI has been just fantastic to work with.
Thanks for sharing and taking the time to document your repo. I’m also sometimes unsure of “self-promotion” — especially when you don’t have anything to sell, including yourself.
I sometimes don’t share links, due to this and then sometimes overshare or miss the mark on relevance.
But sometimes when I do share people are excited about it, so I’ve leaned more to sharing. Worst is you get some downvotes or negative comments, so why not if there is some lurker who might get benefit.
When you don’t blog or influence, how else but in related HN comment threads are like-minded people gonna know about some random GitHub repo?
My second level hope is that it gets picked up by AI crawlers and get aligned somewhere in the latent space to help prompters find it.
ETA: “The [Prompt Engineer] skill was optimized using itself.” That is a whole other self-promotional writeup possibility right there.
Yes thank you! I find I get more than enough done (and more than enough code to review) by prompting the agent step by step. I want to see what kind of projects are getting done with multiple async autonomous agents. Was hoping to find youtube videos of someone setting up a project for multiple agents so I could see the cadence of the human stepping in and making directions
I have not used Claude. But my experience with Gemini and aider is that multiple instances of agents will absolutely stomp over each other. Even in a single sessions overwriting my changes after telling the agent that I did modifications will often result in clobbering.
I run 3-5 on distinct projects often. (20x plan) I quite enjoy the context switching and always have. I have a vanilla setup too, and I don't use plugins/skills/commands, sometimes I enable a MCP server for different things and definitely list out cli tools in my claude.md files. I keep a Google doc open where I list out all the projects I'm working on and write notes as I'm jumping thought the Claude tabs, I also start drafting more complex prompts in the Google doc. I've been using turbo repo a lot so I don't have to context switch the architecture in my head. (But projects still using multiple types of DevOps set ups)
Often these days I vibe code a feedback loop for each project, a way to validate itself as OP said. This adds time to how long Claude takes to complete giving me time to switch context for another active project.
I also use light mode which might help others... jks
I suppose he may have a list of feature requests and bug reports to work on, but it does seem a bit odd from a human perspective to want to work on 5 or more things literally in parallel, unless they are all so simple that there is no cognitive load and context switching required to mentally juggle them.
Washing dishes in parallel with laundry and cleaning is of course easily possible, but precisely because there is no cognitive load involved. When the washing machine stops you can interrupt what you are doing to load clothes into the drier, then go back to cleaning/whatever. Software development for anything non-trivial obviously has a much higher task-switching overhead. Optimal flow for a purely human developer is to "load context" at the beginning of the day, then remain in flow-state without interruptions.
The cynical part of me can't also help but wonder if Cherny/Anthopic aren't just advocating token-maxxing!
Same though here. I use Claude opus via api billing for tasks not that hard to implement but for which CC takes much less time than I would. However:
* a small PR costs 5-16 usd (I’ve been monitoring this for the past two days). Management is already pushing for us to use Cursor or a new tool called Augment Cod.
* I can submit 4 to 5 PRs in a day
* the bottleneck becomes:
- writing clear instructions and making the right choices
- running tests
- my mental capacity for context switching
- code reviewing, correcting
- Deployment
- Even further live testing
I don’t understand how I could have 10 parallel workers without the output being degraded due to my inability to manage them. But I can see myself wasting a lot of $$ trying. And something tells me the thread is just normalizing throwing money at them
I agree. I'm imagining a large software team with hundreds of tickets "ready to be worked on" might support this workflow - but even then, surely you're going to start running into unnecessary conflicts.
The max Claude instances I've run is 2 because beyond that, I'm - as you say - unable to actually determine the next best course during the processing time. I could spend the entire day planning / designing prompts - and perhaps that will be the most efficient software development practise in the future. And/or perhaps there it is a sign I'm doing insufficient design up front.
I would do the same thing if I would justifing paying 200$ per Month for my hobby. But even with that, you will run into throttling / API / Resource limits.
But AI Agents need time. They need a little bit of reading the sourcecode, proposing the change, making the change, running the verification loop, creating the git commit etc. Can be a minute, can be 10 and potentially a lot longer too.
So if your code base is big enough that you can work o different topics, you just do that:
- Fix this small bug in the UI when xy happens
- Add a new field to this form
- Cleanup the README with content x
- . . .
I'm an architect at work and have done product management on the side as its a very technical project. I have very little problem coming up with things to fix, enhnace, cleanup etc. I have hard limits on my headcount.
I could easily do a handful of things in parallel and keeping that in my head. Working memory might be limited but working memory means something different than following 10 topics. Especially if there are a few tpics inbetween which just take time with the whole feedback loop.
But regarding your example of house cleaning: I have ADHD, i sometimes work like this. Working on something, waiting for a build and cleaning soming in parallel.
What you are missing is the practical experience with Agents. Taking the time and energy of setting up something for you, perhaps accessability too?
We only got access at work to claude code since end of last year.
For me it's their speed, yes. I only run 0-3 at a time, and often the problem at hand is very much not complex. For example "Take this component out of the file into its own file, including its styles." The agent may take 5 minutes for that and what do I do in the meantime? I can start another agent for the next task at hand.
Could also be a bug hunt "Sometimes we get an error message about XYZ, please investigate how that might happen." or "Please move setting XY from localstorage to cookies".
I rarely run 10 top-level sessions, but I often run multiple.
Here is one case, though:
I have a prototype Ruby compiler that long languished because I didn't have time. I recently picked up work on it again with Claude Code.
There are literally thousands of unimplemented methods in the standard library. While that has not been my focus so far, my next step for it is to make Claude work on implementing missing methods in 10+ sessions in parallel, because why not? While there are some inter-dependencies (e.g. code that would at least be better with more of the methods of the lowest level core classes already in place), a huge proportion are mostly independent.
In this case the rubyspec test suite is there to verify compliance. On top of that I have my own tests (does the compiler still compile itself, and does the selftests still run when compiled with self-compiled compiler?) so having 10+ sessions "pick off" missing pieces, make an attempt see if it can make it pass, and move on, works well.
My main limitation is that I have already once run into the weekly limits of my (most expensive) Claude Max subscription, and I need it for other things too for client work and I'm not willing to pay-per-token for the API use for that project since it's not immediately giving me a return.
(And yes, they're "slow" - but faster than me; if they were fast enough, then sure, it'd be nicer to have them run serially, the same way if you had time it's easier to get cohesive work if a single developer does all the work on a project instead of having a team try to coordinate)
It just happens automatically. Once you set it running and it's chugging away there's nothing for you to do for a while. So of course you start working on something else. Then that is running ... before you know it, 5 of them are going and you have forgotten which is what and this is your new problem.
For one of the things I am doing, I am the solo developer on a web application. At any given point, there are 4-5 large features I want and I instruct Claude to heavily test those features, so it is not unusual for each to run for 30-45 minutes and for overall conversations to span several hours. People are correct that it often makes mistakes, so that testing phase usually uncovers a bunch of issues it has to fix.
I usually have 1-2 mop up terminal windows open for small things I notice as I go along that I want to fix. Claude can be bad about things like putting white text on a white button and I want a free terminal to just drop every little nitpick into it. They exist for me to just throw small tasks into. Yes, you really should start a new convo every need, but these are small things and I do not want to disrupt my flow.
There are another 2-3 for smaller features that I am regularly reviewing and resetting. And then another one dedicated to just running the tests already built over and over again and solving any failures or investigating things. Another one is for research to tell me things about the codebase.
Depends on the project you are working on. Solo on a web app? You probably have 100s of small things to fix. Some more padding there, add a small new feature here, etc.
> don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week
I don't like to be mean, but I few weeks ago the guy bragged about Claude helping him do +50k loc and -48k loc(netting a 2k loc), I thought he was joking because I know plenty of programmers who do exactly that without AI, they just commit 10 huge json test files or re-format code.
I almost never open a PR without a thorough cleanup whereas some people seem to love opening huge PRs.
I use Beads which makes it more easy to grasp since its "tickets" for the agent, and I tell it what I want, it creates a bead (or "ticket") and then I ask it to do research, brain dump on it, and even ask it to ask me clarifying questions, and it updates the tasks, by the end once I have a few tasks with essentially a well defined prompt, I tell Claude to run x tasks in parallel, sometimes I dump a bunch of different tasks and ask it to research them all in parallel, and it fills them in, and I review. When it's all over, I test the code, look at the code, and mention any follow ups.
I guess it comes down to, how much do you trust the agent? If you don't trust it fully you want to inspect everything, which you still can, but you can choose to do it after it runs wild instead of every second it works.
My impression is that people who are exploring coordinated multi-agent-coding systems are working towards replacing full teams, not augmenting individuals. "Meaningful supervising role" becomes "automated quality and process control"; "generate requirements quickly" -> we already do this for large human software teams.
If that's the goal, then we shouldn't interpret the current experiment as the destination.
Potentially, a lot of that isn't just code generation, it *is* requirements gathering, design iteration, analysis, debugging, etc.
I've been using CC for non-programming tasks and its been pretty successful so far, at least for personal projects (bordering on the edge of non-trivial). For instance, I'll get a 'designer' agent coming up with spec, and a 'design-critic' to challenge the design and make the original agent defend their choices. They can ask open questions after each round and I'll provide human feedback. After a few rounds of this, we whittle it down to a decent spec and try it out after handing it off to a coding agent.
Another example from work: I fired off some code analysis to an agent with the goal of creating integration tests, and then ran a set of spec reviewers in parallel to check its work before creating the actual tickets.
My point is there are a lot of steps involved in the whole product development process and isn't just "ship production code". And we can reduce the ambiguity/hallucinations/sycophancy by creating validation/checkpoints (either tests, 'critic' agents to challenge designs/spec, or human QA/validation when appropriate)
The end game of this approach is you have dozens or hundreds of agents running via some kind of orchestrator churning through a backlog that is combination human + AI generated, and the system posts questions to the human user(s) to gather feedback. The human spends most of the time doing high-level design/validation and answering open questions.
You definitely incur some cognitive debt and risk it doing something you don't want, but thats part of the fun for me (assuming it doesn't kill my AI bill).
Do you generally only have one problem? For me the use case is that I have numerous needs and Claude frees up time to work on some of the more complicated ones.
> It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.
In this case you have to take a leap of faith and assume that Claude or Codex will get each task done correctly enough that your house won't burn down.
Agree. People are stuck applying the "agent" = "employee" analogy and think they are more productive by having a team/company of agents. Unless you've perfectly spec'ed and detailed multiple projects up front, the speed of a single agent shouldn't be the bottleneck.
>> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem
In most of these kinds of posts, that's still you. I don't believe i've come across a pro-faster-keyboard post yet that claims AGI. Despite the name, LLMs have no agency, it's still all on you.
Once you've defined the next most important problem, you have a smaller problem - translate those requirements into code which accurately meets them. That's the bit where these models can successfully take over. I think of them as a faster keyboard and i've not seen a reason to change my mind yet despite using them heavily.
The problem isn't generating requirements, it's validating work. Spec driven development and voice chat with ticket/chat context is pretty fast, but the validation loop is still mostly manual. When I'm building, I can orchestrate multiple swarm no problem, however any time I have to drop in to validate stuff, my throughput drops and I can only drive 1-2 agents at a time.
It depends on the specifics of the tasks; I routinely work on 3-5 projects at once (sometimes completely different stuff), and having a tool like cloud code fits great in my workflow.
Also, the feedback doesnt have to be immediate: sometimes I have sessions that run over a week, because of casual iterations; In my case its quite common to do this to test concepts, micro-benchmarking and library design.
If you're trying to solve one very hard problem, parallelism is not the answer. Recursion is.
Recursion can give you an exponential reduction in error as you descend into the call stack. It's not guaranteed in the context of an LLM but there are ways to strongly encourage some contraction in error at each step. As long as you are, on average, working with a slightly smaller version of the problem each time you recurse, you still get exponential scaling.
> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.
If you only have that one problem, that is a reasonable criticism, but you may have 10 different problems and want to focus on the important one while the smaller stuff is AIed away.
> I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work.
I am generally happy with the assumptions it makes when given few requirements? In a lot of cases I just need a feature and the specifics are fairly open or very obvious given the context.
For example, I am adding MFA options to one project. As I already have MFA for another portal on it, I just told Claude to add MFA options for all users. Single sentence with no details. Result seems perfectly servicable, if in need of some CSS changes.
Exactly. And if that problem is complex, your first step should be to plan how to sub-divide it anyway. So just ask Claude to map out interdependencies for tasks to look for opportunities to paralellise.
The captive audience is not you, it's people salivating at the train of thought where they can 100x productivity of whatever and push those features that will get paying customers so they can get bought from private equity and ride out on the sunset. This whole thing is existential dread on a global scale, driven by sociopaths and everyone is just unable to not bend over.
Painfully true. A lot of YouTube on LLM coding tools has become just that. Make quick bucks, look it generated a dashboard of some sort (why is it always dashboards?) and a high polished story of someone vibing a copy of a successful Saas and selling it off for a million.
A shame really, for there are good resources for better making use of LLMs in coding.
The only way to achieve that level of parallelism is by not knowing what you are doing or the peoblem space you are working in to begin with and just throwing multiple ill defined queries at agents until something "works". It's sort of a modern infinite monkey theorem if you will.
It's all smokes really. Claude Code is an unreliable piece of software and yet one of the better ones in LLM-Coding. (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues). That and I highly suspect it's mostly engineers who are working on it instead of LLMs. Google itself with all its resources and engineers can't come up with a half-decent CLI for coding.
Reminder: The guy works for Claude. Claude is over-hyping LLMs. That's like a Jeweler dealer assistant telling you how Gold chains helped his romantic life.
Let’s not forget the massive bias in the author: for all we know this post is a thinly veiled marketing pitch for “how to use the most tokens from your AI provider and ramp up your bill.”
This isn’t about being the most productive or having the best workflow, it’s about maximizing how much Claude is a part of your workflow.
> This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works
The cynic in me is it's a marketing pitch to sell "see this is way cheaper than 10 devs!". The "agent" thing leans heavily into bean counter CTO/CIO marketing.
Claude is absolutely plastering Facebook with this bullshit.
Every PR Claude makes needs to be reviewed. Every single one. So great! You have 10 instances of Claude doing things. Great! You're still going to need to do 10 reviews.
At the begining of the project, the runs are fast, but as the project gets bigger, the runs are slower:
- there are bigger contexts
- the test suite is much longer and slower
- you need to split worktree, resources (like db, ports) and sometimes containers to work in isolation
So having 10 workers will run for a long time. Which give plenty of time to write good spec.
You need good spec, so the llm produce good tests, so it can write good code to match these tests.
Having a very strong spec + test suite + quality gates (linter, type checkers, etc) is the only way to get good results from an LLM as the project become more complex.
Unlike a human, it's not very good at isolating complexity by itself, nor stopping and asking question in the face of ambiguity. So the guardrails are the only thing that keeps it on track.
And running a lot of guardrail takes time.
E.G: yesterday I had a big migration to do from HTMX to viewjs, I asked the LLM to produce screenshots of each state, and then do the migration in steps in a way that kept the screenshit 90% identical.
This way I knew it would not break the design.
But it's very long to run e2e tests + screenshot comparison every time you do a modification. Still faster than a human, but it gives plenty of time to talk to another llm.
Plus you can assign them very different task:
- One work on adding a new feature
- One improves the design
- One refactor part of the code (it's something you should do regularly, LLM produce tech debt quickly)
- One add more test to your test suite
- One is deploying on a new server
- One is analyzing the logs of your dev/test/prod server and tell you what's up
- One is cooking up a new logo for you and generating x versions at different resolutions.
> I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work.
You use agents to expand the requirements as well, either in plan mode (as OP does) or with a custom scaffold (rules in CLAUDE.md about how to handle requirements; personally I prefer giving Claude the latitude to start when Claude is ready rather than wait for my go-ahead)
> I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.
[this got long: TL;DR: This is what works for me: Stop worrying about individual steps; use sub-agents and slash-commands to encapsulate units of work to make Claude run longer; use permissions to allow as much as you dare (and/or run in a VM to allow Claude to run longer; give Claude tools to verify its work (linters, test suites, sub-agents double-checking the work against the spec) and make it use it; don't sit and wait and read invidiual parts of the conversation - it will only infuriate you to see Claude make stupid mistakes, but if well scaffolded it will fix them before it returns the code to you, so stop reading, breathe, and let it work; only verify when Claude has worked for a long time and checked its own work -- that way you review far less code and far more complete and coherent changes]
You don't. You wait until each agent is done, and you review the PR's. To make this kind of thing work well you need agents and slash-commands, like OP does - sub-agents in particular help prevent the top-level agents from "context anxiety": Claude Code appears to have knowledge of context use, and will be prone to stopping before context runs out; sub-agents use their own context and the top-level agent only uses context to manage the input to and output from them, so the more is farmed out to sub-agents, the longer Claude Code is willing to run. I when I got up this morning, Claude Code had run all night and produced about 110k words of output.
This also requires extensive permissions to use safe tools without asking (what OP does), or --dangerously-skip-permissions (I usually do this; you might want to put this in a container/VM as it will happily do things like "killall -9 python" or similar without "thinking through" consequences - I've had it kill the terminal it itself ran in before), or it'll stop far too quickly.
You'll also want to explicitly tell it to do things in parallel when possible. E.g. if you want to use it as a "smarter linter" (DO NOT rely on it as the only linter, use a regular one too, but using claude to apply more complex rules that requires some reasoning works great), you can ask it to "run the linter agent in parallel on all typescript files" for example, and it will tend to spawn multiple sub-agents running in parallel, and metaphorically twiddle its thumbs waiting for them to finish (it's fun seeing it get "bored" and decide to do other things in the meantime, or get impatient and check on progress obsessively).
You'll also want to make Claude use sub-agents to review, verify, test its work, with instructions to repeat until all the verification sub-agents give its changes a PASS (see 12/ and 13/ in the thread) - there is no reason for you to waste your time reviewing code that Claude itself can tell isn't ready.
[E.g. concrete example: "Vanilla" Claude "loves" using instance_variable_get() in Ruby if facing a class that is missing an accessor for an instance variable. Whether you know Ruby or not, that should stand out like a sore thumb - it's a horrifically gross code smell, as it's basically bypassing encapsulation entirely. But you shouldn't worry about that - if you write Ruby with Claude, you'd want a rule in CLAUDE.md telling it how to address missing accessors, and sub-agent, and possibly a hook, making sure that Claude is told to fix it immediately if it ever uses it.]
Farming it off to sub-agents both makes it willing to work longer, especially on "boring" tasks, and avoids the problem that it'll look at past work and decide it already "knows" this code is ready and start skipping steps.
The key thing is to stop obsessing over every step Claude takes, and treat that as a developer experimenting with something they're not clear on how to do yet. If you let it work, and its instructions are good, and it has ways of checking its work, it will figure out its first attempts are broken, fix them, and leave you with output that takes far less of your time to review.
When Claude tells you its done with a change, if you stop egregious problems, fix your CLAUDE.md, fix your planning steps, fix your agents.
None of the above will absolve you of reviewing code, and you will need to kick things back and have it fix them, and sometimes that will be tedious, but Claude is good enough that the problems you have it fix should be complex, not simple code smells or logic errors, and 9 out 10 times they should signal that your scaffold is lacking important detail about your project or that your spec is incomplete at a functional/acceptance criteria level (not low level detail)
50-100 PRs a week to me is insane. I'm a little skeptical and wonder how large/impactful they are. I use AI a lot and have seen significant productivity gains but not at that level lol.
Most likely
* The rest of the team also reviews
* If you're the founder, chances are that people will just accept reviews without reading much and give you priority in reviews
I work for a FAANG and I'm the top reviewer in my team (in terms of number of PRs reviewed). I work on an internal greenfield project, so something really fast moving.
For ALL of 2025 I reviewed around 400 PRs. And that already took me an extreme amount of time.
Nobody is reviewing this many PRs.
I've also raised around 350 PRs in the same year, which is also #1 for my team.
AI or not, nobody is raising upwards of 3,500 CRs a year. In fact, my WHOLE TEAM of 15 people has barely raised this number of CRs for the year.
I don't know why people keep believing those wild unproven claims from actors who have everything to gain from you believing them. Has common sense gone down the drain that much, even for educated professionals?
Because he is working on a product that is hot and has demand from the users for new features/bug fixes/whatnot and also gets visibility on getting such things delivered. Most of us don't work on products that have that on a daily basis.
For comparison, I remember doing 250 PRs in 2.5 months of my internship at FB (working on a fullstack web app). So that’s 2-4x faster. What’s interesting is that it’s Boris, not an intern (although the LLM can play an intern well).
This was extremely useful to read for many reasons, but my favorite thing I learned is that you can “teleport” a task FROM the local Claude Code to Claude Code on the web by prepending your request with “&”. That makes it a “background” task, which I initially erroneously thought was a local background task. Turns out it sends the task and conversation history up to the web version. This allows you to do work in other branches on Claude Code web, (and then teleport those sessions back down to local later if you wish)
OpenCode is actually client server architecture. Typically one either runs the TUI or the web interface. I wonder if it would cope ok with running multiple interfaces at once?
Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas. Always a great superpower to have, if you can hack it. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2161
Chrome DevToops Protocol added multiple client support maybe 5 years ago? It's super handy there because automation tools also use the same port. So you couldn't automate and debug at the same time!
That is a really tool ability, to move work between different executors. OpenCode is also super good at letting you open an old session & carry on, so you can switch between. I appreciate the mention; I love the mobile ambient aspect of how Claude Code can teleport this all!!
> Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas.
Why cram all features into one giant software instead of using multiple smaller pieces of software in conjunction? For the feature you mentioned I just use tmux which is built for this stuff.
Also, OpenCode has been extremely unreliable. I opened a PR about one of the simplest tools ever: `ls`, and they haven't fixed it yet. In a folder, their ls doesn't actually do what you'd expect: if iterates over all files of all folders (200 limit) and shows them to the model...
> Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas. Always a great superpower to have, if you can hack it. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/
1) everyone on the team uses Claude code differently.
2) Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
3) Everything this person says should be taken with a massive grain of salt considering their various conflicts of interest.
The UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.
Claude Code is fairly simple. But Claude Desktop is a freaking mess, it loses chats when I switch tabs, it has no easy way to auto-extend the context, and it's just slow.
I also find it odd that despite a whole team of people working on Claude Code with Claude Code, which should make them immensely productive, there are still glaring gaps. Like, why doesn’t Claude Code on Web have the plan mode? The model already knows how to use it, it’s just a UI change.
Normally I would cut them some slack but it doesn’t really make sense, couldn’t someone kick off a PR today and get it done?
> The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time
You know, this bugs me out. Claude code, macOS, Windows... they're all becoming buggy, filled with papercuts everywhere... and this coincided with layoffs + mass adoption of LLM coding tools and services.
>2) Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
Not my experience at all (macOS Tahoe/iTerm2, no tmux).
Speaking of either Claude Code as a tool, or Claude 4.5 as an LLM used with coding.
> Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
Shhh, this is not what you’re supposed to look at.
Look! Bazillion more agents! Gorrilion more agents! Productivity! Fire those lazy code monkeys, buy our product! Make me riiiich.
I implemented some of his setup and have been loving it so far.
My current workflow is typically 3-5 Claude Codes in parallel
- Shallow clone, plan mode back and forth until I get the spec down, hand off to subagent to write a plan.md
- Ralph Wiggum Claude using plan.md and skills until PR passes tests, CI/CD, auto-responds to greptile reviews, prepares the PR for me to review
- Back and forth with Claude for any incremental changes or fixes
- Playwright MCP for Claude to view the browser for frontend
I still always comb through the PRs and double check everything including local testing, which is definitely the bottleneck in my dev cycles, but I'll typically have 2-4 PRs lined up ready for me at any moment.
We have a giant monorepo, hence the shallow clones. Each Claude works on its own feature / bug / ticket though, sometimes in the same part of the codebase but usually in different parts (my ralph loop has them resolve any merge conflicts automatically). I also have one Claude running just for spelunking through K8s, doing research, or asking questions about the codebase I'm unfamiliar with.
I feel like it's time for me to hang up this career. Prompting is boring, and doing it 5 times at once is just annoying multitasking. I know I'm mostly in it for the money, but at least there used to be a feeling of accomplishment sometimes. Now it's like, whose accomplishment is it?
This is the creator of a product saying how good it is.
If you've worked anywhere professionally you know how every place has its problems, where people just lie constantly about things?
Yeah.
Keep at it and see where things go.
I'm also a dev a bit overwhelmed by all of this talk, at my job I've tried quite a few things and I'm still mostly just using copilot for auto complete and very small tasks that I review throughly, everything else is manually.
If this is indeed the future I also don't wanna be a part of it and will switch to another career, but all this talk seems to come only from the people who actually built these things.
Or try to find a job where you can work how you like to work. With these things it's always "get more done ! MORE ! MORE !". But not all jobs are like this.
Agreed, the author basically says that coding is not required anymore, the job is reviewing code. Do engineers not actually want to build things themselves anymore? Where is the joy and pride in the craft? Are we just supposed to maximize productivity at the expense of our life's experience? Are we any different than machines at that point?
I feel like it’s not talked about enough that the ultimate irony of software engineering is that, as an industry, it’s aiming to make itself obsolete as much as possible. I struggle to think of any other industry that, completely on their own accord, has actively pushed to put themselves out of work to such a degree.
prompting in my experience is boring and/or frustrating. Why anyone would want to do more of that without MASSIVE financial incentives is unthinkable. No composer or writer would ever want to prompt a "work".
I tried Claude Code a while back when I decided to give "vibe-coding" a go. That was was actually quite successful, producing a little utility that I use to this day, completely without looking at the code. (Well, I did briefly glance at it after completion and it made my eyeballs melt.) I concluded the value of this to me personally was nowhere near the price I was charged so I didn't continue using it, but I was impressed nonetheless.
This brief use of Claude Code was done mostly on a train using my mobile phone's wi-fi hotspot. Since the connection would be lost whenever the train went through a tunnel, I encountered a bug in Claude Code [1]. The result of it was that whenever the connection dropped and came up again I had to edit an internal json file it used to track the state of its tool use, which had become corrupt.
The issue had been open for months then, and still is. The discussion under it is truly remarkable, and includes this comment from the devs:
> While we are always monitoring instances of this error and and looking to fix them, it's unlikely we will ever completely eliminate it due to how tricky concurrency problems are in general.
Claude Code is, in principle, a simple command-line utility. I am confident that (given the backend and model, ofc) I could implement the functionality of it that I used in (generously!) at most a few thousand lines of python or javascript, I am very confident that I could do so without introducing concurrency bugs and I am extremely confident that I could do it without messing up the design so badly that concurrency issues crop up continually and I have to admit to being powerless to fix them all.
Programming is hard, concurrency problems are tricky and I don't like to cast aspersions on other developers, but we're being told this is the future of programming and we'd better get on board or be left behind and it looks like we're being told this by people who, with presumably unlimited access to all this wonderful tooling, don't appear to be able to write decent software.
Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Intellicene is the disproportionate access to AI. The ability to petition them to do what you want is currently based on monthly subscriptions, but will it change in the future? Who knows?
It would be funny if the company paying software engineers $500K or more along with gold-plated stock options was limiting how much they could use the software their company was developing.
Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
Pretty sure I have seen them imply in one of the panel discussions on their YouTube channel (can't remember which) that they get unlimited use of the best models. I remember them talking about records for the most spent in a day or something.
Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.
It is the case that Anthropic employees have no usage limits.
Some people do experiments where they spawn up hundreds of Claude instances just to see if any of them succeed.
It would be very interesting to see the outputs of his operations. How productive is one of his agents? How long does it take to complete a task, and how often does it require steering?
I'm a bit of a skeptic. Claude Code is good, but I've had varied results during my usage. Even just 5 minutes ago, I asked CC to view the most recent commit diff using git show. Even when I provided the command, it was doing dumb shit like git show --stat and then running wc for some reason...
I've been working on something called postkit[1], which has required me to build incrementally on a codebase that started from nothing and has now grown quite a lot. As it's grown, Claude Code's performance has definitely dipped.
The funniest part of that whole thing was when someone said "I trusted you, but you use light mode on your terminal" and then he replied that people stop by his desk daily just to make fun of him for it.
I started with dark mode because that's what amber text on a terminal was... but then the big thing was UI's simulating paper and then we had a turn to dark mode but recently I've gone back to the light side.
What I find surprising is how much human intervention the creator of Claude uses. Every time Claude does something bad we write it in claude.md so he learns from it... Why not create an agent to handle this and learn automatically from previous implementations.
B: Outcome Weighting
# memory/store.py
OUTCOME_WEIGHTS = {
RunOutcome.SUCCESS: 1.0, # Full weight
RunOutcome.PARTIAL: 0.7, # Some issues but shipped
RunOutcome.FAILED: 0.3, # Downweighted but still findable
RunOutcome.CANCELLED: 0.2, # Minimal weight
}
# Applied during scoring:
final_score = score * decay_factor * outcome_weight
C: Anti-Pattern Retrieval
# Similar features → SUCCESS/PARTIAL only
similar_features = store.search(..., outcome_filter=[SUCCESS, PARTIAL])
# Anti-patterns → FAILED only (separate section)
anti_patterns = store.search(..., outcome_filter=[FAILED])
Injected into agent prompt:
## Similar Past Features (Successful)
1. "Add rate limiting with Redis..." (Outcome: success, Score: 0.87)
## Anti-Patterns (What NOT to Do)
_These similar attempts failed - avoid these approaches:_
1. "Add rate limiting with in-memory..." (FAILED, Score: 0.72)
## Watch Out For
- **Redis connection timeout**: Set connection pool size
The flow now:
Query: "Add rate limiting"
│
├──► Similar successful features (ranked by outcome × decay × similarity)
│
├──► Failed attempts (shown as warnings)
│
└──► Agent sees both "what worked" AND "what didn't"
I'm afraid to ask, but because I've been very happy with Codex 5.2 CLI and I can't imagine Claude Code doing better, why is it Claude so loved around here?
Sure, I can spend $20 and figure it out, but I already pay $40/mo for two ChatGPT subs and that's enough to get me through a month.
I'm a late comer to AI but I started using Gemini in June 2025.
Then in december I heard from my co-workers that they were liking Claude better than any other model, and from others online, so I bought myself some Claude for xmas. And I could clearly see that it was better, right away.
That's all I know, only one model to compare with, but the difference was definitely tangible.
Why are you asking this? Just try it. It takes maybe fifteen minutes of your time. It’s $20. There is no possible argument against $20 or fifteen minutes if the tool has a chance of being even just 10% better. You’ve spent more time typing by the comment and I responding than it would take to…just try it…
The main difference is that slash commands are invoked by humans, whereas skills can only be invoked by the agent itself. It works kinda as conditional instructions.
As an example, I have skills that aide in adding more detail to plans/specs, debugging, and for spinning up/partitioning subagents to execute tasks. I don't need to invoke a slash command each time, and the agent can contextually know by the instructions I give it what skills to use.
In the reddit thread Boris says they’re adding the ability to call skills via slash commands in an upcoming release and that he uses the term skill and slash commands interchangeably.
I believe slash commands are all loaded into the initial context and executed when invoked by the user. Skills on the other hand only load the name and description into initial context, and the agent (not user) determines when to invoke them, and only then is the whole skill loaded into context. So skills shift decision making to the agent and use progressive disclosure for context efficiency.
How much Codex and Claude Code are different from each other?
I have been using Codex for few weeks doing experiments related to data analysis and training models with some architecture modifications. I wouldn't say I have used it extensively, but so far my experience has been good. Only annoying part has been not able to use GPU in the Codex without using `--sandbox danger-full-access` flag. Today, I started using Claude Code, and ran similar experiments as Codex. I find the interface is quite similar to Codex. However, I hit the limit quite quickly in Claude Code. I will be exploring its features further. I would appreciate if anyone can share their experience of using both tools.
How has Claude Code (as a CLI tool, not the backing models) evolved over the last year?
For me it's practically the same, except for features that I don't need, don't work that well and are context-hungry.
Meanwhile, Claude Code still doesn't know how to jump to a dependency (library's) source to obtain factual information about it. Which is actually quite easy by hand (normally it's cd'ing into a directory or unzipping some file).
So, this wasteful workflow only resulted in vibecoded, non-core features while at the domain level, Claude Code remains overly agnostic if not stupid.
Frankly Claude code is painfully slow. To the point I get frustrated.
On large codebases I often find it taking 20+ minutes to do basic things like writing tests.
Way too often people are like it takes 2 minutes for it to do a full pr. Yeah how big is the code base actually.
I also have a coworker who is about 10x more then everyone else. Burning through credits yet he is one of the lowest performers.{closing in on around 1k worth of credits a day now).
$1,000.00 of credits per-day?? $200,000 per year? Those are bonkers numbers for someone not performing at a high level (on-top of their salary). Do you know what they are doing?
Yup. The way he works is all tasks he is issued in a sprint he just fires them through opus in parallel hoping to get a hit on Claude magically solving the ticket having them constantly be iterated on them. He doesnt even try using proper having plans be created.
Often time tickets get fleshed out or requirements change. He just throws everything out and reshoves it into Claude.
Warm take for sure, but I feel that LLMs and agents have made me a worse programmer as a whole. I am enjoying the less mental strain as I do my hobbies like sketching/art while the LLM is running. But definitely it isn't making me any faster.
I'm at the point of considering another job but I just fear that my skills have deteriorated to the point that I can't pass any (manual) coding assessments anymore
I don't understand how these setups scale longterm, and even more so for the average user. The latter is relevant because, as he points out, his setup isn't that far out of reach of the average person - it's still fairly close to out of the box claude code, and opus.
But between the model qualities varying, the pricing, the timing, the tools constantly changing, I think it's really difficult to build the institutional knowledge and setup that can be used beyond a few weeks.
In the era of AI, I don't tink it's good enough to "have" a working product. It's also important to have all the other things that make a project way more productive, like stellar documentation, better abstractions, clearer architecture. In terms of AI, there's gotta be something better than just a markdown file with random notes. Like what happens when an agent does something because it's picking something up from some random slack convo, or some minor note in a 10k claude.md file. It just seems like the wild west where basic ideas like additional surface area being a liability is ignored because we're too early in the cycle.
tl;dr If it's just pushing around typical mid-level code, then... I just think that's falling behind.
I'm a bit jealous. I would like to experiment with having a similar setup, but 10x Opus 4.5 running practically non stop must amount to a very high inference bill. Is it really worth the output?
From experimentation, I need to coach the models quite closely in order to get enough value. Letting it loose only works when I've given very specific instructions. But I'm using Codex and Clai, perhaps Claude code is better.
I have a coworker who is basically doing this right now he leads our team and is second place overall. Regularly runs opus in parallel he alone is burning through 1k worth of credits a day.
I've tried running a number of claude's in paralell on a CRUD full stack JS app. Yes, it got features made faster, yes it definitely did not leave me enough time to acutally look at what they did, yes it definitely produced sub-par code.
At the moment with one claude + manually fixing crap it produces I am faster at solving "easier" features (Think add API endpoint, re-build API client, implement frontend logic for API endpoint + UI) faster than if I write it myself.
Things that are more logic dense, it tends to produce so many errors that it's faster to solve myself.
I get some of the skepticism in this thread, but I don't get takes like this. How are you using cc that the output you look at is "full of errors"? By the time I look at the output of a session the agent has already ran linting, formatting, testing and so on. The things I look at are adherence to the conventions, files touched, libraries used, and so on. And the "error rate" on those has been steadily coming down. Especially if you also use a review loop (w/ codex since it has been the best at review lately).
You have to set these things up for success. You need loops with clear feedback. You need a project that has lots of clear things to adhere to. You need tight integrations. But once you have these things, if you're looking at "errors", you're doing something wrong IMO.
I’ve found that experienced devs use agentic coding in a more “hands-on” way than beginners and pure vibe-coders.
Vibecoders are the best because they push the models in humorous and unexpected ways.
Junior devs are like “I automated the deploy process via an agent and this markdown file”
Seasoned devs will spend more time writing the prompt for a bug fix, or lazily paste the error and then make the 1-line change themselves.
The current crop of LLMs are more powerful than any of these use cases, and it’s exciting to see experienced devs start to figure that out (I’m not stanning Gas Town[0], but it’s a glimpse of the potential).
Partially related: I really dislike the vibe of Gas Town, both the post and the tool, I really hope this isn't what the future looks like. It just feels disappointing.
I would highly recommend every project maintain a simple, well-written AGENTS.md file. At first it may seem like a more nitpicky README, but you will quickly see how much coding agents benefit from this added context. Imo, the two most important things to include in AGENTS.md are frequent commands and verification methods.
A third thing I've started adding to my projects is a list of related documentation and libraries that may not be immediately obvious. Things like confluence pages and other repos associated with the project.
I had this ShowHN yesterday, which didn't grab much attention, so i'm using this opportunity as it seems relevant (it is a solution for running CC in parallel)
if you folks like to run parallel claude-code sessions, and like native terminal like Ghostty, i have a solution for using Git Worktree natively with Ghostty, it is called agentastic.dev, and it has a built-in Worktree/IDE/Diff/Codereview around Ghostty (macos only for now).
That's just unrealistic. If i were to use it like this as an actual end user i would get stopped by rate limits/those weekly / session limits instantly
One thing that’s helped me is creating a bake-off. I’ll do it between Claude and codex. Same prompt but separate environments. They’ll both do their thing and then I’ll score them at the end. I find it helps me because frequently only one of them makes a mistake, or one of them finds an interesting solution. Then once I declare a winner I have scripts to reset the bake-off environments.
One of my side projects has been to recover a K&R C computer algebra system from the 1980's, port to modern 64-bit C. I'd have eight tabs at a time assigned files from a task server, to make passes at 60 or so files. This nearly worked; I'm paused till I can have an agent with a context window that can look at all the code at once. Or I'll attempt a fresh translation based on what I learned.
With a $200 monthly Max subscription, I would regularly stall after completing significant work, but this workflow was feasible. I tried my API key for an hour once; it taught me to laugh at the $200 as quite a deal.
I agree that Opus 4.5 is the only reasonable use of my time. We wouldn't hire some guy off the fryer line to be our CTO; coding needs best effort.
Nevertheless, I thought my setup was involved, but if Boris considers his to be vanilla ice cream then I'm drinking skim milk.
Having the 5 instances going at once sounds like Google Antigravity.
I haven't used Claude Code too much. One snag I found is the tendency when running into snags to fix them incorrectly by rolling back to older versions of things. I think it would benefit from an MCP server for say Maven Central. Likewise it should prefer to generate code using things like project scaffolding tooling whenever possible.
I can't imagine that it has some kind of special access to Anthropic's servers and that it does things an API-user can't do, maybe except for the option to use the Claude.ai credits/quota.
Even their Agent SDK just wraps the `claude`-executable, IIRC.
I spent a whole day running 3x local CC sessions and about 7 Claude code web sessions over the day. This was the most heavy usage day ever for me, about 30 pull requests created and merged over 3 projects.
I got a lot done, but my brain was fried after that. Like wired but totally exhausted.
Has anyone else experienced this and did you find strategies to help (or find that it gets easier)?
I have formal requirements for all implemented code. This is all on relatively greenfield solo developed codebases with tools I know inside out (Django, click based cli etc) so yes. Thanks so much for your concern, internet person!
This feels like the desperate, look at me! post, which is the exact opposite of Andrej Karpathy's recent tweet[0] about feeling left behind as a programmer, as covered on Hacker News[1].
I guess would want to see how sustainable this 5 parallel AI effort is, and are there demonstrably positive outcomes. There are plenty of "I one-shotted this" examples of something that already (mostly) existed, which are very impressive in their own right, but I haven't seen a lot of truly novel creations.
I wonder what sort of problems you must have to get this upset about the creator of a particular software telling people how they personally use that software
Personally I keep open several tabs of CC but it's not often that more than one or two of them would be running at the same time. It's just to keep particular context around for different parts of the same application since it's quite big (I don't use CC for creating new projects). For example if I had it work on a feature and then I realized there was a bug or an adjustment in the same files that needed to be made then I can just go back to that tab hours or maybe even days later without digging through history
> I assume "what sort of problems you must have" was directed at me.
I don't really have any sort of personal problem with Boris' post, if what your inflammatory statement was implying.
I also think it was a fairly good description of his workflow, technically speaking, but also glosses over the actual monetary costs of what he is doing, and also as noted above, doesn't really describe the actual outcomes other than a lot of PRs.
It’s really a convenience to force the model to use the planning tool and it prevents edit/write tools until the user approves the plan, like an inverse of “auto accept edits” mode.
Ao this guy is personally responsible for the RAM shortage, it seems. Jokes aside, i have a similar setup, but with a mix of claude and a local model. Claude can access the local model for simple and repetitive tasks, and it actually does a good job on testing UI. Great way to save tokens.
I have to say it sounds insane. 5 tabs of claude, back and forth from terminal to browser - and no actual workflow detailed. Are we to believe that claude is making changes in parallel to one codebase, and if so - why?
I actually use dozens of claude codes "in parallel" myself (most are sitting idle for a lot of the time though). I set up a web interface and then made it usable by others at clodhost.com if anybody wants to try it (free)!
Yeah... I had a fairly in-depth conversation with Claude a couple of days ago about Claude Code and the way it works, and usage limits, and comparison to how other AI coding tools work, and the extremely blunt advice from Claude was that Claude Code was not suitable for serious software development due to usage limits! (props to Anthropic for not sugar coating it!)
Maybe on the Max 20x plan it becomes viable, and no doubt on the Boris Cherny unlimited usage plan it does, but it seems that without very aggressive non-stop context pruning you will rapidly hit limits and the 5-hour timeout even working with a single session, let alone 5 Claude Code sessions and another 5-10 web ones!
The key to this is the way that Claude Code (the local part) works and interacts with Claude AI (the actual model, running in the cloud). Basically Claude Code maintains the context, comprising mostly of the session history, contents of source files it has accessed, and the read/write/edit tools (based on Node.js) it is providing for Claude AI. This entire context, including all files that have been read, and the tools definitions, are sent to Claude AI (eating into your token usage limit) with EVERY request, so once Claude Code has accessed a few source files then the content of those files will "silently" be sent as part of every subsequent request, regardless of what it is. Claude gave me an example of where with 3 smallish files open (a few thousand lines of code), then within 5 requests the token usage might be 80,000 or so, vs the 40,000 limit of the Pro plan or 200,000 limit of the Max 5x plan. Once you hit limit then you have to wait 5 hours for a usage reset, so without Cherny's infinite usage limit this becomes a game of hurry up and wait (make 5 requests, then wait 5 hours and make 5 more).
You can restrict what source files Claude Code has access to, to try to manage context size (e.g. in a C++ project, let it access all the .h module definition files, but block all the .cpp ones) as well as manually inspecting the context all the time to see what is being sent that can be removed. I believe there is some automatic context compaction happening periodically too, but apparently not enough to prevent many/most people hitting usage time outs when working on larger projects.
Not relevant here, but Claude also explained how Cursor manages to provide fast/cheap autocomplete using it's own models by building a vector index of the code base to only pull relevant chunks of code into the context.
Ah, thank you! Now I feel like an idiot. I guess I was thinking “ultrathink” was a specially interpreted command within claude code (sort of like a slash command).
Have others not noticed the extremely obvious astroturfing campaign specifically promoting Claude code that is mostly happening on X in recent days/weeks?
A classic hacker news post that will surely interest coders from all walks of life! ~
After regular use of an AI coding assistant for some time, I see something unusual: my biggest wins came from neither better prompts nor a smarter model. They originated from the way I operated.
At first, I thought of it as autocomplete. Afterwards, similar to a junior developer. In the end, a collaborator who requires constraints.
Here is a framework I have landed on.
First Step: Request for everything. Obtain acceleration, but lots of noise.
Stage two: Include regulations. Less Shock, More Trust.
Phase 3: Allow time for acting but don’t hesitate to perform reviews aggressively.
A few habits that made a big difference.
Specify what can be touched or come into contact with.
Asking it to explain differences before applying them.
Consider “wrong but confident” answers as signal to tighten scope.
Wondering what others see only after time.
What transformations occurred after the second or fourth week?
When was the trust increased or reduced?
What regulations do you wish you had added earlier?
The amount of people holding strong opinions on LLMs who openly admit they have not tried the state of the art tools is so high on Hacker news right now, that it's refreshing to get actual updates from the tool's creators.
I read a comment yesterday that said something like "many people tried LLMs early on, it was kind of janky and so they gave up, thinking LLMs are bad". They were probably right at the time, but the tech _has_ improved since then, while those opinions have not changed much.
So, yes claude code and sonnet/opus 4.5 is another step change that you should try out. For $20/month you can run claude code in the terminal and regular claude on the web app.
For lots of software unless you really know what you are doing it's best to just leave the default settings alone and not dig too deep into what's not immediately intended to do. For my application lots of bug reports come from people using our advanced settings without reading any of the instructions at all and screwing it up
So in the case of him being the creator obviously he built it for his needs
I'm a heavy claude code user but this is starting to smell like BS. There is nothing special in claude code, opus is a good model and with lots of requests it can give good results. There is nothing unique to it.
Absolutely shocking... Boris uses a light themed terminal?! Kidding aside, these were great tips. I am quite intrigued by the handing off of local Claude sessions to the web version. I wonder if this feature exists for the other Coding CLI agents.
I doubt he’d use Claude code as it is. I’m sure he’d upgrade to think harder and do more iterations and go deeper. Codex for example already does that but could go deeper a bit longer to figure out more.
https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177
This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works.
I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.
I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.
It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.
Likely I am missing something. This is just my gut reaction as someone who has definitely not mastered using agents. Would love to hear from anyone that has a similar workflow where there is high parallelism.
My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code".
I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay area because of the importance of working in an office to reduce communication hurdles. But if I can really 10x my current productivity, I can get the power of a seed series startup with even less communication overhead (I could also get by with much less capital). Imagine being able to hire 10 reliable junior-mid engineers who unquestionably followed your instruction and didn't need to sleep. This is what I keep being told we have for $200/month. Forget not needing engineers, why do we need angel investors or even early stage VC? A single smart engineer should be able, if all the claims I'm hearing are true, to easily accomplish in months what used to take years.
But I keep seeing products shipped at the same speed but with a $200 per month per user overhead. Honestly I would love to be wrong on this because that would be incredibly cool. But unfortunately I'm not seeing it yet.
Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this.
I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a consideration that if they advertise their 1 eng status and success, it might attract other competitors or the customers might think they can do it themselves (maybe possible, but not for 95% of them since some tech know how is still required) or customers would see it as a business risk.
All 3 have blown me away with what they are doing. All 3 have real, paying customers. (They occasionally reach out for some higher order architecture questions)
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So true, as a mere software developer on a payroll: I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks )))) And when I work on my hobby project - having one AI agent crawling around my codebase is like watching a baby in a glassware shop. 10 babies? no thanks!
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> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
After months of hearing that people are producing software in months that would normally take years, the best examples of vibe coded software I've seen look like they would normally take months, not years. If you don't care how they're built or how long it took (which a user generally doesn't), much of the remaining shine comes off.
If I'm wrong, I'd love to see it. A genuinely big piece of software produced entirely (or near entirely?) with AI that would've normally taken talented engineers years to build.
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I do stuff in my free time now that would have been a full time job a year ago. Accomplishing in months what would have taken years. (And doing in days what would have taken weeks.) I'm talking about actually built-out products with a decent amount of code and features, not basic prototypes. I feel like the vibe is "put up or shut up", so check out my bio for one example.
I think your logic goes wrong because you assume that more productivity implies less desire for engineers. But now engineers are maybe 2x or 5x more productive than before. So that makes them more attractive to hire than before. It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool. It's like if new pickaxes were invented that let your gold miners dig 5x more gold. You'd see an explosion in gold miners, not a reduction. For another example, I spend all my free time coding now because I can do so much now. I get so much more result for the same effort, that it makes sense to put more effort in.
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And to push this example further, if you can hire 10 developers each commanding 10 reliable junior-mid developers you have a team of 100, which is probably more than enough to build basically any software project in existence. WhatsApp was built with way less than that.
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Because a startup is NOT just writing code. It's also understanding what you are building, and for whom.
The issues of product market fit did not suddenly disappear:
https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-startups...
They are absolutely crushing it. I know of a one-man shop that just got notice they were selected for an eight-figure revenue contract. They would NEVER go public with their head count or their product being built by AI.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups
Oh, man, they're just waiting for their poster boy to show up. Once first unicorn "built by a single person" pops up you'll regret having a single social network account.
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Who should be seeing that? The thing about 1 person startups is that it requires little to no communication to start up, and also very little capital. Seems easy to fly below the radar.
Also "a ton", idk. Doing a startup is still hard, for reasons outside of just being able to write a lot of code. In my experience churning out all this code at 10x is coming with a significant complexity tax: Turns out writing code and thinking about code problems was the relaxing part. When that goes away you have to think about real world problems only. What a fucking mess.
Still, I would assume that it's more of a thing now, and something you could observe when you have YC data for example. Do we know that's not the case? I am in no position to say, one way or the other.
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My favorite movie quote as it pertains to software engineering has for a long time been Jurassic Park's: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
That’s how I feel about a lot of AI-powered development. Just because you can have 10 parallel agents cranking out features 24/7 and have AI write 100% of the code, that doesn’t mean you’re actually building a product that users want and/or that is a viable business.
I’m currently in this situation, working on a greenfield project as founder/solo dev. Yes, AI has been tremendously useful in speeding things up, especially in patching over smaller knowledge gaps of mine.
But in the end, as in all the projects before in my career, building the MVP has rarely been the hard part of starting a company.
I agree with you. I don’t think number of startups or less reliance on funding is the measure though.
Businesses are not code. They solve problems, find their customers, convince them to buy their solution, and maintain that relationship.
Code has always been a factor but not the critical one.
"pushing 996"
What does this mean? You mean they have close to 1k employees? Odd typo or odd way to say it.
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> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups
How do you know this is not happening. There is always a lag. By the time you visibly see it, its already past.
are there really startups (in the US) pushing 996?
My brother is selling a CRM he developed for his business to others for a couple thousand a month.
There is no way he would have built the CRM as quickly pre-AI.
He built, in a few months, what would have taken maybe one to two years before.
It's probably going to be a while before someone builds the next Instagram with AI. But I think that's more a function of product fit and idea. Less so how fast one person can code.
The first billion-dollar solopreneur likely is going to happen at some point, but it's still a one-in-a-million shot, no matter how fast a person can code.
Look at how many startups fail despite plenty of money for programmers.
But I am seeing friends get to revenue faster with AI on small ideas.
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A lot of people either a) don’t know about the good tools or b) aren’t using them enough/properly.
There is a ton of anti-AI sentiment, and not all LLMs are equal. There is a lot of individual adoption that is yet to occur.
I know at least two startups that are one person or two people that are punching way above their weight due to this force multiplier. I don’t think it’s industry-wide yet, but it will be relatively soon.
Check back in on your assessment in a year.
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If all of this really worked, Claude Code would not be a buggy, slow, frustratingly limited, and overall poorly written application. It can't even reload a "plugin" at runtime. Something that native code plugin hosts have been doing since plugins existed, where it's actually hard to do.
Claude Plugins are a couple `.md` file references, some `/command` handler registrations, and a few other pieces of trivial state. There's not a lot there, but you have to restart the whole damn app to install or update one.
Plus, there's the **ing terminal refresh bug they haven't managed to fix over the past year. Maybe put a team of 30 code agents on that. If I sound bitter, it's because the model itself is genuinely very good. I've just been stuck for a very long time working with it through Claude Code.
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> I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay area because of the importance of working in an office to reduce communication hurdles.
This is toxic behavior by these companies, and is not backed by any empirical data that I’ve ever seen. It should be shunned and called out.
As far as the remainder of your post, I think you’ve uncovered solid evidence that the abilities of LLMs to code on their own, without human planning, architecting, and constant correction, is significantly oversold by most of the companies pushing the tech.
I'm a 1-person startup doing pretty well.
I got laid off in the first half of 2025 and decided to use my severance to see if I could go full-time with my side project. Over the last six months I've gone from zero to about $200k in ARR, and 75% of that was in the last three months. My average customer is paying about $250 / month.
I have zero help, I do everything myself: coding, design, marketing, sales, etc. The product uses AI to replace humans in a niche industry, so the core of the product is AI, but I also increasingly build it with AI. I rarely code manually these days, I'm just riding herd on agents, often in between sales calls, dealing with customer support, etc. I may eventually hire a VA-type person to help with admin and customer support stuff where it changes often enough that it's not worth it to build an AI workflow for, but even there...I don't know. If we get reliable computer use models in 2026 or 2027, I probably won't ever hire anyone.
I've never talked openly in tech circles about this product, nor will I. The technical challenges are non-trivial, so I don't think it'd be easy to replicate for another engineer, but my competitors are all dinosaurs and getting customers to switch to me is incredibly easy. The last thing I need is another engineer spinning up a competitor.
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> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
Too early. Wait a year. People are just coming to grips how to really make these agents make good changes and large enough changes to really start accelerating.
Also, expect a number of those startups to be entirely stealth and wait longer to raise, as well as maybe in many cases be more fleeting and/or far more fast moving (having to totally re-invent what they're doing at a pace you wouldn't expect to before).
I've been full in on this for 2 years now, and I'm only just at the stage where I feel my setups and model capabilities are intersecting to produce results good enough that I've started testing if one project I'm working on will actually manage to generate revenue.
I'm not going to tell you what it is, because if I did there's too little moat and HN is crawling with great people who could probably replicate it and execute on it faster than me, and Claude is capable of doing all the heavy lifting entirely by itself - that in itself is what makes it potentially viable -, so sorry for being vauge.
If it shows signs of generating revenue, it'll be so cheap to scale because of Claude, that I'll be able scale it far before I need to raise any capital.
But other people will figure it out, most likely other people are already doing the same thing.
As a result I have a short window, and it likely will close as model improvements will make it more and more trivial to do what I'm trying to do, so my approach is to try to extract as much return as I can in as little time as I can, hoping there isn't yet too much competition, and then move on.
This last part will also limit - a lot of people just won't be able to move fast enough (I might not have), and so a lot of these "one person startups" won't ever become visible because they won't even get to a stage where people are ready to talk about it.
In this case, it is easily measurable how much time Claude has saved me, because I've done the same thing before, manually, and made money from it, and the fastest turnaround I've achieved before was 21 days. So far, my first test run with Claude + me in the loop produced the same quality in 3 days, my second in 2 days, my third 12 hours, and I think I can drive it down towards 1-2 hours of my time, with me being the blocker to speeding it up beyond that.
At 21 days it wasn't really profitable. At 1-2 days it "should be" wildly profitable unless I'm already too late. If I can get it down to an hour or two of my time, then I'd also be able to hire to scale it further with good margin, and the question is just finding the sweet spot.
This opportunity will never be a unicorn, but there's a lot of money there if you don't need to raise, and the cost of scaling it to the sweet spot where I maximise my returns is something I should be able to finance without outside money the moment I validate that the unit economics are right.
You might not hear about this "one person startup" again until it either has failed and I decide to tell the story, or it's succeeded but the opportunity has closed and I've made what I can make from it. I suspect there will be many cases like mine that you'll never hear about at all.
(and yes, I realise a lot of people will just dismiss this as bullshit because I won't give details; that's fine)
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I hope self-promotion isn't frowned upon, but I've been spending the past months figuring out a workflow [1] that helps tackle the "more complicated problems" and ensure long-term maintainability of projects when done purely through Claude Code.
Effectively, I try to:
- Do not allow the LLM to make any implicit decisions, but instead confirm with the user.
- Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs;
- Capture all "invisible knowledge" around decisions and architecture that's difficult to infer from code alone.
It's based entirely on Claude Code sub-agents + skills. The skills almost all invoke a Python script that guides the agents through workflows.
It's not a fast workflow: it frequently takes more than 1 hour just for the planning phase. Execution is significantly faster, as (typically) most issues have been discovered during the planning phase already (otherwise it would be considered a bug and I'd improve the workflow based on that).
I'm under the impression that the creator of Claude Code's post is also intended to raise awareness of certain features of Claude Code, such as hand-offs to the cloud and back. Their workflow only works for small features. It reads a bit like someone took a “best practices” guide and turned it into a twitter post. Nice, but not nearly detailed enough for an actual workflow.
[1] https://github.com/solatis/claude-config/
> Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs;
> Capture all "invisible knowledge" around decisions and architecture that's difficult to infer from code alone.
I work on projects where people love to create all sorts of complex abstractions but also hate writing ADRs (so they don’t) or often any sorts of comments and when they do they’re not very well written. Like the expectation is that you should call and ask the person who wrote something or have a multi-hour meeting where you make decisions and write nothing down.
That sort of environment is only conductive to manual work, dear reader, avoid those. Heed the advice above about documenting stuff.
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> Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to understand for LLMs
Over the summer last year, I had the AI (Gemini Pro 2.5) write base libraries from scratch that area easy for itself to write code against. Now GPro3 can one-shot (with, at most, a single debug loop at the REPL) 100% of the normal code I need developed (back office/business-type code).
Huge productivity booster, there are a few things that are very easy for humans to do that AI struggles with. By removing them, the AI has been just fantastic to work with.
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Thanks for sharing and taking the time to document your repo. I’m also sometimes unsure of “self-promotion” — especially when you don’t have anything to sell, including yourself.
I sometimes don’t share links, due to this and then sometimes overshare or miss the mark on relevance.
But sometimes when I do share people are excited about it, so I’ve leaned more to sharing. Worst is you get some downvotes or negative comments, so why not if there is some lurker who might get benefit.
When you don’t blog or influence, how else but in related HN comment threads are like-minded people gonna know about some random GitHub repo?
My second level hope is that it gets picked up by AI crawlers and get aligned somewhere in the latent space to help prompters find it.
ETA: “The [Prompt Engineer] skill was optimized using itself.” That is a whole other self-promotional writeup possibility right there.
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Yes thank you! I find I get more than enough done (and more than enough code to review) by prompting the agent step by step. I want to see what kind of projects are getting done with multiple async autonomous agents. Was hoping to find youtube videos of someone setting up a project for multiple agents so I could see the cadence of the human stepping in and making directions
Multiple instances of agents are an equivalent to tabs in other applications - primarily holders of state, rather than means for extreme parallelism.
I have not used Claude. But my experience with Gemini and aider is that multiple instances of agents will absolutely stomp over each other. Even in a single sessions overwriting my changes after telling the agent that I did modifications will often result in clobbering.
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Personally I just use /resume to switch back to other states when I need to.
I run 3-5 on distinct projects often. (20x plan) I quite enjoy the context switching and always have. I have a vanilla setup too, and I don't use plugins/skills/commands, sometimes I enable a MCP server for different things and definitely list out cli tools in my claude.md files. I keep a Google doc open where I list out all the projects I'm working on and write notes as I'm jumping thought the Claude tabs, I also start drafting more complex prompts in the Google doc. I've been using turbo repo a lot so I don't have to context switch the architecture in my head. (But projects still using multiple types of DevOps set ups)
Often these days I vibe code a feedback loop for each project, a way to validate itself as OP said. This adds time to how long Claude takes to complete giving me time to switch context for another active project.
I also use light mode which might help others... jks
I suppose he may have a list of feature requests and bug reports to work on, but it does seem a bit odd from a human perspective to want to work on 5 or more things literally in parallel, unless they are all so simple that there is no cognitive load and context switching required to mentally juggle them.
Washing dishes in parallel with laundry and cleaning is of course easily possible, but precisely because there is no cognitive load involved. When the washing machine stops you can interrupt what you are doing to load clothes into the drier, then go back to cleaning/whatever. Software development for anything non-trivial obviously has a much higher task-switching overhead. Optimal flow for a purely human developer is to "load context" at the beginning of the day, then remain in flow-state without interruptions.
The cynical part of me can't also help but wonder if Cherny/Anthopic aren't just advocating token-maxxing!
Same though here. I use Claude opus via api billing for tasks not that hard to implement but for which CC takes much less time than I would. However:
* a small PR costs 5-16 usd (I’ve been monitoring this for the past two days). Management is already pushing for us to use Cursor or a new tool called Augment Cod. * I can submit 4 to 5 PRs in a day * the bottleneck becomes:
- writing clear instructions and making the right choices - running tests - my mental capacity for context switching - code reviewing, correcting - Deployment - Even further live testing
I don’t understand how I could have 10 parallel workers without the output being degraded due to my inability to manage them. But I can see myself wasting a lot of $$ trying. And something tells me the thread is just normalizing throwing money at them
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I agree. I'm imagining a large software team with hundreds of tickets "ready to be worked on" might support this workflow - but even then, surely you're going to start running into unnecessary conflicts.
The max Claude instances I've run is 2 because beyond that, I'm - as you say - unable to actually determine the next best course during the processing time. I could spend the entire day planning / designing prompts - and perhaps that will be the most efficient software development practise in the future. And/or perhaps there it is a sign I'm doing insufficient design up front.
I would do the same thing if I would justifing paying 200$ per Month for my hobby. But even with that, you will run into throttling / API / Resource limits.
But AI Agents need time. They need a little bit of reading the sourcecode, proposing the change, making the change, running the verification loop, creating the git commit etc. Can be a minute, can be 10 and potentially a lot longer too.
So if your code base is big enough that you can work o different topics, you just do that:
- Fix this small bug in the UI when xy happens - Add a new field to this form - Cleanup the README with content x - . . .
I'm an architect at work and have done product management on the side as its a very technical project. I have very little problem coming up with things to fix, enhnace, cleanup etc. I have hard limits on my headcount.
I could easily do a handful of things in parallel and keeping that in my head. Working memory might be limited but working memory means something different than following 10 topics. Especially if there are a few tpics inbetween which just take time with the whole feedback loop.
But regarding your example of house cleaning: I have ADHD, i sometimes work like this. Working on something, waiting for a build and cleaning soming in parallel.
What you are missing is the practical experience with Agents. Taking the time and energy of setting up something for you, perhaps accessability too?
We only got access at work to claude code since end of last year.
Yeah I don’t understand these posts recently with people running 10 at once
Can someone give an example of what each of them would be doing?
Are they just really slow, is that the problem?
For me it's their speed, yes. I only run 0-3 at a time, and often the problem at hand is very much not complex. For example "Take this component out of the file into its own file, including its styles." The agent may take 5 minutes for that and what do I do in the meantime? I can start another agent for the next task at hand.
Could also be a bug hunt "Sometimes we get an error message about XYZ, please investigate how that might happen." or "Please move setting XY from localstorage to cookies".
I rarely run 10 top-level sessions, but I often run multiple.
Here is one case, though:
I have a prototype Ruby compiler that long languished because I didn't have time. I recently picked up work on it again with Claude Code.
There are literally thousands of unimplemented methods in the standard library. While that has not been my focus so far, my next step for it is to make Claude work on implementing missing methods in 10+ sessions in parallel, because why not? While there are some inter-dependencies (e.g. code that would at least be better with more of the methods of the lowest level core classes already in place), a huge proportion are mostly independent.
In this case the rubyspec test suite is there to verify compliance. On top of that I have my own tests (does the compiler still compile itself, and does the selftests still run when compiled with self-compiled compiler?) so having 10+ sessions "pick off" missing pieces, make an attempt see if it can make it pass, and move on, works well.
My main limitation is that I have already once run into the weekly limits of my (most expensive) Claude Max subscription, and I need it for other things too for client work and I'm not willing to pay-per-token for the API use for that project since it's not immediately giving me a return.
(And yes, they're "slow" - but faster than me; if they were fast enough, then sure, it'd be nicer to have them run serially, the same way if you had time it's easier to get cohesive work if a single developer does all the work on a project instead of having a team try to coordinate)
It just happens automatically. Once you set it running and it's chugging away there's nothing for you to do for a while. So of course you start working on something else. Then that is running ... before you know it, 5 of them are going and you have forgotten which is what and this is your new problem.
Yep.
For one of the things I am doing, I am the solo developer on a web application. At any given point, there are 4-5 large features I want and I instruct Claude to heavily test those features, so it is not unusual for each to run for 30-45 minutes and for overall conversations to span several hours. People are correct that it often makes mistakes, so that testing phase usually uncovers a bunch of issues it has to fix.
I usually have 1-2 mop up terminal windows open for small things I notice as I go along that I want to fix. Claude can be bad about things like putting white text on a white button and I want a free terminal to just drop every little nitpick into it. They exist for me to just throw small tasks into. Yes, you really should start a new convo every need, but these are small things and I do not want to disrupt my flow.
There are another 2-3 for smaller features that I am regularly reviewing and resetting. And then another one dedicated to just running the tests already built over and over again and solving any failures or investigating things. Another one is for research to tell me things about the codebase.
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Depends on the project you are working on. Solo on a web app? You probably have 100s of small things to fix. Some more padding there, add a small new feature here, etc.
> don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week
I don't like to be mean, but I few weeks ago the guy bragged about Claude helping him do +50k loc and -48k loc(netting a 2k loc), I thought he was joking because I know plenty of programmers who do exactly that without AI, they just commit 10 huge json test files or re-format code.
I almost never open a PR without a thorough cleanup whereas some people seem to love opening huge PRs.
LLM agents can be a bit like slot machines. The more the merrier.
And at least two generate continuous shitposts for their companies Slack.
That said, having one write code and a clean context review it is helpful.
I use Beads which makes it more easy to grasp since its "tickets" for the agent, and I tell it what I want, it creates a bead (or "ticket") and then I ask it to do research, brain dump on it, and even ask it to ask me clarifying questions, and it updates the tasks, by the end once I have a few tasks with essentially a well defined prompt, I tell Claude to run x tasks in parallel, sometimes I dump a bunch of different tasks and ask it to research them all in parallel, and it fills them in, and I review. When it's all over, I test the code, look at the code, and mention any follow ups.
I guess it comes down to, how much do you trust the agent? If you don't trust it fully you want to inspect everything, which you still can, but you can choose to do it after it runs wild instead of every second it works.
My impression is that people who are exploring coordinated multi-agent-coding systems are working towards replacing full teams, not augmenting individuals. "Meaningful supervising role" becomes "automated quality and process control"; "generate requirements quickly" -> we already do this for large human software teams.
If that's the goal, then we shouldn't interpret the current experiment as the destination.
Potentially, a lot of that isn't just code generation, it *is* requirements gathering, design iteration, analysis, debugging, etc.
I've been using CC for non-programming tasks and its been pretty successful so far, at least for personal projects (bordering on the edge of non-trivial). For instance, I'll get a 'designer' agent coming up with spec, and a 'design-critic' to challenge the design and make the original agent defend their choices. They can ask open questions after each round and I'll provide human feedback. After a few rounds of this, we whittle it down to a decent spec and try it out after handing it off to a coding agent.
Another example from work: I fired off some code analysis to an agent with the goal of creating integration tests, and then ran a set of spec reviewers in parallel to check its work before creating the actual tickets.
My point is there are a lot of steps involved in the whole product development process and isn't just "ship production code". And we can reduce the ambiguity/hallucinations/sycophancy by creating validation/checkpoints (either tests, 'critic' agents to challenge designs/spec, or human QA/validation when appropriate)
The end game of this approach is you have dozens or hundreds of agents running via some kind of orchestrator churning through a backlog that is combination human + AI generated, and the system posts questions to the human user(s) to gather feedback. The human spends most of the time doing high-level design/validation and answering open questions.
You definitely incur some cognitive debt and risk it doing something you don't want, but thats part of the fun for me (assuming it doesn't kill my AI bill).
This is it! “I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.”
maybe more like throw shits to the wall and see what sticks?
Do you generally only have one problem? For me the use case is that I have numerous needs and Claude frees up time to work on some of the more complicated ones.
I usually have 4-5, but it's because they are working on different parts of the codebase, or some I will use as read only to brainstorm
> It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.
In this case you have to take a leap of faith and assume that Claude or Codex will get each task done correctly enough that your house won't burn down.
Agree. People are stuck applying the "agent" = "employee" analogy and think they are more productive by having a team/company of agents. Unless you've perfectly spec'ed and detailed multiple projects up front, the speed of a single agent shouldn't be the bottleneck.
That’s how it works though. You create a detailed spec up front. That’s the workflow.
>> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem
In most of these kinds of posts, that's still you. I don't believe i've come across a pro-faster-keyboard post yet that claims AGI. Despite the name, LLMs have no agency, it's still all on you.
Once you've defined the next most important problem, you have a smaller problem - translate those requirements into code which accurately meets them. That's the bit where these models can successfully take over. I think of them as a faster keyboard and i've not seen a reason to change my mind yet despite using them heavily.
Why do you assume AGI needs to have agency?
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The problem isn't generating requirements, it's validating work. Spec driven development and voice chat with ticket/chat context is pretty fast, but the validation loop is still mostly manual. When I'm building, I can orchestrate multiple swarm no problem, however any time I have to drop in to validate stuff, my throughput drops and I can only drive 1-2 agents at a time.
It depends on the specifics of the tasks; I routinely work on 3-5 projects at once (sometimes completely different stuff), and having a tool like cloud code fits great in my workflow.
Also, the feedback doesnt have to be immediate: sometimes I have sessions that run over a week, because of casual iterations; In my case its quite common to do this to test concepts, micro-benchmarking and library design.
If you're trying to solve one very hard problem, parallelism is not the answer. Recursion is.
Recursion can give you an exponential reduction in error as you descend into the call stack. It's not guaranteed in the context of an LLM but there are ways to strongly encourage some contraction in error at each step. As long as you are, on average, working with a slightly smaller version of the problem each time you recurse, you still get exponential scaling.
> It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.
But we do this routinely with machines. Not saying I don't get your point re 100 PRs a week, just that it's a strange metaphor given the similarities.
50-100 PRs a week but they still can't fix the 'flickering' bug
I see you haven’t tried BMAD-METHOD or spec-kit yet.
This is just the creator of Claude Code overselling Claude Code
> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.
If you only have that one problem, that is a reasonable criticism, but you may have 10 different problems and want to focus on the important one while the smaller stuff is AIed away.
> I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work.
I am generally happy with the assumptions it makes when given few requirements? In a lot of cases I just need a feature and the specifics are fairly open or very obvious given the context.
For example, I am adding MFA options to one project. As I already have MFA for another portal on it, I just told Claude to add MFA options for all users. Single sentence with no details. Result seems perfectly servicable, if in need of some CSS changes.
Exactly. And if that problem is complex, your first step should be to plan how to sub-divide it anyway. So just ask Claude to map out interdependencies for tasks to look for opportunities to paralellise.
The captive audience is not you, it's people salivating at the train of thought where they can 100x productivity of whatever and push those features that will get paying customers so they can get bought from private equity and ride out on the sunset. This whole thing is existential dread on a global scale, driven by sociopaths and everyone is just unable to not bend over.
Painfully true. A lot of YouTube on LLM coding tools has become just that. Make quick bucks, look it generated a dashboard of some sort (why is it always dashboards?) and a high polished story of someone vibing a copy of a successful Saas and selling it off for a million.
A shame really, for there are good resources for better making use of LLMs in coding.
The only way to achieve that level of parallelism is by not knowing what you are doing or the peoblem space you are working in to begin with and just throwing multiple ill defined queries at agents until something "works". It's sort of a modern infinite monkey theorem if you will.
It's all smokes really. Claude Code is an unreliable piece of software and yet one of the better ones in LLM-Coding. (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues). That and I highly suspect it's mostly engineers who are working on it instead of LLMs. Google itself with all its resources and engineers can't come up with a half-decent CLI for coding.
Reminder: The guy works for Claude. Claude is over-hyping LLMs. That's like a Jeweler dealer assistant telling you how Gold chains helped his romantic life.
Gemini CLI is decent.
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Prototyping.
Let’s not forget the massive bias in the author: for all we know this post is a thinly veiled marketing pitch for “how to use the most tokens from your AI provider and ramp up your bill.”
This isn’t about being the most productive or having the best workflow, it’s about maximizing how much Claude is a part of your workflow.
> This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works
The cynic in me is it's a marketing pitch to sell "see this is way cheaper than 10 devs!". The "agent" thing leans heavily into bean counter CTO/CIO marketing.
Claude is absolutely plastering Facebook with this bullshit.
Every PR Claude makes needs to be reviewed. Every single one. So great! You have 10 instances of Claude doing things. Great! You're still going to need to do 10 reviews.
Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn are all being heavily astroturfed by Anthropic people to oversell the usefulness of Claude Code. It's actually wild.
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That's why you have Codex review the code.
(I'm only half joking. Having one LLM review the PRs of another is actually useful as a first line filter.)
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At the begining of the project, the runs are fast, but as the project gets bigger, the runs are slower:
- there are bigger contexts
- the test suite is much longer and slower
- you need to split worktree, resources (like db, ports) and sometimes containers to work in isolation
So having 10 workers will run for a long time. Which give plenty of time to write good spec.
You need good spec, so the llm produce good tests, so it can write good code to match these tests.
Having a very strong spec + test suite + quality gates (linter, type checkers, etc) is the only way to get good results from an LLM as the project become more complex.
Unlike a human, it's not very good at isolating complexity by itself, nor stopping and asking question in the face of ambiguity. So the guardrails are the only thing that keeps it on track.
And running a lot of guardrail takes time.
E.G: yesterday I had a big migration to do from HTMX to viewjs, I asked the LLM to produce screenshots of each state, and then do the migration in steps in a way that kept the screenshit 90% identical.
This way I knew it would not break the design.
But it's very long to run e2e tests + screenshot comparison every time you do a modification. Still faster than a human, but it gives plenty of time to talk to another llm.
Plus you can assign them very different task:
- One work on adding a new feature
- One improves the design
- One refactor part of the code (it's something you should do regularly, LLM produce tech debt quickly)
- One add more test to your test suite
- One is deploying on a new server
- One is analyzing the logs of your dev/test/prod server and tell you what's up
- One is cooking up a new logo for you and generating x versions at different resolutions.
Etc.
It's basically a small team at your disposal.
> I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work.
You use agents to expand the requirements as well, either in plan mode (as OP does) or with a custom scaffold (rules in CLAUDE.md about how to handle requirements; personally I prefer giving Claude the latitude to start when Claude is ready rather than wait for my go-ahead)
> I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.
[this got long: TL;DR: This is what works for me: Stop worrying about individual steps; use sub-agents and slash-commands to encapsulate units of work to make Claude run longer; use permissions to allow as much as you dare (and/or run in a VM to allow Claude to run longer; give Claude tools to verify its work (linters, test suites, sub-agents double-checking the work against the spec) and make it use it; don't sit and wait and read invidiual parts of the conversation - it will only infuriate you to see Claude make stupid mistakes, but if well scaffolded it will fix them before it returns the code to you, so stop reading, breathe, and let it work; only verify when Claude has worked for a long time and checked its own work -- that way you review far less code and far more complete and coherent changes]
You don't. You wait until each agent is done, and you review the PR's. To make this kind of thing work well you need agents and slash-commands, like OP does - sub-agents in particular help prevent the top-level agents from "context anxiety": Claude Code appears to have knowledge of context use, and will be prone to stopping before context runs out; sub-agents use their own context and the top-level agent only uses context to manage the input to and output from them, so the more is farmed out to sub-agents, the longer Claude Code is willing to run. I when I got up this morning, Claude Code had run all night and produced about 110k words of output.
This also requires extensive permissions to use safe tools without asking (what OP does), or --dangerously-skip-permissions (I usually do this; you might want to put this in a container/VM as it will happily do things like "killall -9 python" or similar without "thinking through" consequences - I've had it kill the terminal it itself ran in before), or it'll stop far too quickly.
You'll also want to explicitly tell it to do things in parallel when possible. E.g. if you want to use it as a "smarter linter" (DO NOT rely on it as the only linter, use a regular one too, but using claude to apply more complex rules that requires some reasoning works great), you can ask it to "run the linter agent in parallel on all typescript files" for example, and it will tend to spawn multiple sub-agents running in parallel, and metaphorically twiddle its thumbs waiting for them to finish (it's fun seeing it get "bored" and decide to do other things in the meantime, or get impatient and check on progress obsessively).
You'll also want to make Claude use sub-agents to review, verify, test its work, with instructions to repeat until all the verification sub-agents give its changes a PASS (see 12/ and 13/ in the thread) - there is no reason for you to waste your time reviewing code that Claude itself can tell isn't ready.
[E.g. concrete example: "Vanilla" Claude "loves" using instance_variable_get() in Ruby if facing a class that is missing an accessor for an instance variable. Whether you know Ruby or not, that should stand out like a sore thumb - it's a horrifically gross code smell, as it's basically bypassing encapsulation entirely. But you shouldn't worry about that - if you write Ruby with Claude, you'd want a rule in CLAUDE.md telling it how to address missing accessors, and sub-agent, and possibly a hook, making sure that Claude is told to fix it immediately if it ever uses it.]
Farming it off to sub-agents both makes it willing to work longer, especially on "boring" tasks, and avoids the problem that it'll look at past work and decide it already "knows" this code is ready and start skipping steps.
The key thing is to stop obsessing over every step Claude takes, and treat that as a developer experimenting with something they're not clear on how to do yet. If you let it work, and its instructions are good, and it has ways of checking its work, it will figure out its first attempts are broken, fix them, and leave you with output that takes far less of your time to review.
When Claude tells you its done with a change, if you stop egregious problems, fix your CLAUDE.md, fix your planning steps, fix your agents.
None of the above will absolve you of reviewing code, and you will need to kick things back and have it fix them, and sometimes that will be tedious, but Claude is good enough that the problems you have it fix should be complex, not simple code smells or logic errors, and 9 out 10 times they should signal that your scaffold is lacking important detail about your project or that your spec is incomplete at a functional/acceptance criteria level (not low level detail)
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skill issue
same way a lesser engineer might say they cannot do X or Y
He did a follow up with someone on Reddit and the answers were posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q2c0ne/comment/n...
It offers a lot more context and I found it more helpful than the original twitter thread
50-100 PRs a week to me is insane. I'm a little skeptical and wonder how large/impactful they are. I use AI a lot and have seen significant productivity gains but not at that level lol.
Most likely * The rest of the team also reviews * If you're the founder, chances are that people will just accept reviews without reading much and give you priority in reviews
So I can see this happening in a practical sense.
Yeh, 100 PRs a week is a PR every 24 minutes at standard working hours (not including lunch break). That would be crazy to even review.
I work for a FAANG and I'm the top reviewer in my team (in terms of number of PRs reviewed). I work on an internal greenfield project, so something really fast moving.
For ALL of 2025 I reviewed around 400 PRs. And that already took me an extreme amount of time.
Nobody is reviewing this many PRs.
I've also raised around 350 PRs in the same year, which is also #1 for my team.
AI or not, nobody is raising upwards of 3,500 CRs a year. In fact, my WHOLE TEAM of 15 people has barely raised this number of CRs for the year.
I don't know why people keep believing those wild unproven claims from actors who have everything to gain from you believing them. Has common sense gone down the drain that much, even for educated professionals?
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Because he is working on a product that is hot and has demand from the users for new features/bug fixes/whatnot and also gets visibility on getting such things delivered. Most of us don't work on products that have that on a daily basis.
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For comparison, I remember doing 250 PRs in 2.5 months of my internship at FB (working on a fullstack web app). So that’s 2-4x faster. What’s interesting is that it’s Boris, not an intern (although the LLM can play an intern well).
50-100 is a lot, but 15 a week should be normal with continuous integration, you should be merging multiple times a day
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iirc he (or his colleague) did mention somewhere on X that most of the PRs are small
When people do PR counting then I assume they're dependabot-style stuff.
This was extremely useful to read for many reasons, but my favorite thing I learned is that you can “teleport” a task FROM the local Claude Code to Claude Code on the web by prepending your request with “&”. That makes it a “background” task, which I initially erroneously thought was a local background task. Turns out it sends the task and conversation history up to the web version. This allows you to do work in other branches on Claude Code web, (and then teleport those sessions back down to local later if you wish)
OpenCode is actually client server architecture. Typically one either runs the TUI or the web interface. I wonder if it would cope ok with running multiple interfaces at once?
Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas. Always a great superpower to have, if you can hack it. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2161
Chrome DevToops Protocol added multiple client support maybe 5 years ago? It's super handy there because automation tools also use the same port. So you couldn't automate and debug at the same time!
That is a really tool ability, to move work between different executors. OpenCode is also super good at letting you open an old session & carry on, so you can switch between. I appreciate the mention; I love the mobile ambient aspect of how Claude Code can teleport this all!!
> Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas.
Why cram all features into one giant software instead of using multiple smaller pieces of software in conjunction? For the feature you mentioned I just use tmux which is built for this stuff.
Also, OpenCode has been extremely unreliable. I opened a PR about one of the simplest tools ever: `ls`, and they haven't fixed it yet. In a folder, their ls doesn't actually do what you'd expect: if iterates over all files of all folders (200 limit) and shows them to the model...
> Neovim has a decade old feature request for multiple clients to be able to connect to it. No traction alas. Always a great superpower to have, if you can hack it. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/
I do this to great effect with Emacs daemon mode.
Couple things stand out to me:
1) everyone on the team uses Claude code differently.
2) Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
3) Everything this person says should be taken with a massive grain of salt considering their various conflicts of interest.
>Everything this person says should be taken with a massive grain of salt considering their various conflicts of interest.
Exactly, he has to dogfood it. He can't just say "actually this is a massively annoying way of developing software and probably slows me down".
He also has very clear incentives to not only promote it, but believe in it.
(2) isn't my experience at all. It's not 100% bug free but it definitely seems more stable (and faster) than I when I first used it last year.
The UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.
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Claude Code is fairly simple. But Claude Desktop is a freaking mess, it loses chats when I switch tabs, it has no easy way to auto-extend the context, and it's just slow.
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I also find it odd that despite a whole team of people working on Claude Code with Claude Code, which should make them immensely productive, there are still glaring gaps. Like, why doesn’t Claude Code on Web have the plan mode? The model already knows how to use it, it’s just a UI change.
Normally I would cut them some slack but it doesn’t really make sense, couldn’t someone kick off a PR today and get it done?
> The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time
You know, this bugs me out. Claude code, macOS, Windows... they're all becoming buggy, filled with papercuts everywhere... and this coincided with layoffs + mass adoption of LLM coding tools and services.
>2) Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
Not my experience at all (macOS Tahoe/iTerm2, no tmux).
Speaking of either Claude Code as a tool, or Claude 4.5 as an LLM used with coding.
> Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.
Shhh, this is not what you’re supposed to look at.
Look! Bazillion more agents! Gorrilion more agents! Productivity! Fire those lazy code monkeys, buy our product! Make me riiiich.
I implemented some of his setup and have been loving it so far.
My current workflow is typically 3-5 Claude Codes in parallel
- Shallow clone, plan mode back and forth until I get the spec down, hand off to subagent to write a plan.md
- Ralph Wiggum Claude using plan.md and skills until PR passes tests, CI/CD, auto-responds to greptile reviews, prepares the PR for me to review
- Back and forth with Claude for any incremental changes or fixes
- Playwright MCP for Claude to view the browser for frontend
I still always comb through the PRs and double check everything including local testing, which is definitely the bottleneck in my dev cycles, but I'll typically have 2-4 PRs lined up ready for me at any moment.
Do you prefer Playwright or the Chrome MCP?
3-5 parallel claude code, do they work at same repo?
do they work on same features/goals?
We have a giant monorepo, hence the shallow clones. Each Claude works on its own feature / bug / ticket though, sometimes in the same part of the codebase but usually in different parts (my ralph loop has them resolve any merge conflicts automatically). I also have one Claude running just for spelunking through K8s, doing research, or asking questions about the codebase I'm unfamiliar with.
I feel like it's time for me to hang up this career. Prompting is boring, and doing it 5 times at once is just annoying multitasking. I know I'm mostly in it for the money, but at least there used to be a feeling of accomplishment sometimes. Now it's like, whose accomplishment is it?
Don't give up to the facade just yet.
This is the creator of a product saying how good it is.
If you've worked anywhere professionally you know how every place has its problems, where people just lie constantly about things?
Yeah.
Keep at it and see where things go.
I'm also a dev a bit overwhelmed by all of this talk, at my job I've tried quite a few things and I'm still mostly just using copilot for auto complete and very small tasks that I review throughly, everything else is manually.
If this is indeed the future I also don't wanna be a part of it and will switch to another career, but all this talk seems to come only from the people who actually built these things.
Or try to find a job where you can work how you like to work. With these things it's always "get more done ! MORE ! MORE !". But not all jobs are like this.
Agreed, the author basically says that coding is not required anymore, the job is reviewing code. Do engineers not actually want to build things themselves anymore? Where is the joy and pride in the craft? Are we just supposed to maximize productivity at the expense of our life's experience? Are we any different than machines at that point?
I feel like it’s not talked about enough that the ultimate irony of software engineering is that, as an industry, it’s aiming to make itself obsolete as much as possible. I struggle to think of any other industry that, completely on their own accord, has actively pushed to put themselves out of work to such a degree.
prompting in my experience is boring and/or frustrating. Why anyone would want to do more of that without MASSIVE financial incentives is unthinkable. No composer or writer would ever want to prompt a "work".
you found meaning in the work vs the outcome. You can find meaning in the outcome with a new form of work.
I tried Claude Code a while back when I decided to give "vibe-coding" a go. That was was actually quite successful, producing a little utility that I use to this day, completely without looking at the code. (Well, I did briefly glance at it after completion and it made my eyeballs melt.) I concluded the value of this to me personally was nowhere near the price I was charged so I didn't continue using it, but I was impressed nonetheless.
This brief use of Claude Code was done mostly on a train using my mobile phone's wi-fi hotspot. Since the connection would be lost whenever the train went through a tunnel, I encountered a bug in Claude Code [1]. The result of it was that whenever the connection dropped and came up again I had to edit an internal json file it used to track the state of its tool use, which had become corrupt.
The issue had been open for months then, and still is. The discussion under it is truly remarkable, and includes this comment from the devs:
> While we are always monitoring instances of this error and and looking to fix them, it's unlikely we will ever completely eliminate it due to how tricky concurrency problems are in general.
Claude Code is, in principle, a simple command-line utility. I am confident that (given the backend and model, ofc) I could implement the functionality of it that I used in (generously!) at most a few thousand lines of python or javascript, I am very confident that I could do so without introducing concurrency bugs and I am extremely confident that I could do it without messing up the design so badly that concurrency issues crop up continually and I have to admit to being powerless to fix them all.
Programming is hard, concurrency problems are tricky and I don't like to cast aspersions on other developers, but we're being told this is the future of programming and we'd better get on board or be left behind and it looks like we're being told this by people who, with presumably unlimited access to all this wonderful tooling, don't appear to be able to write decent software.
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6836
Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Intellicene is the disproportionate access to AI. The ability to petition them to do what you want is currently based on monthly subscriptions, but will it change in the future? Who knows?
> (is this the case for Anthropic employees?)
It would be funny if the company paying software engineers $500K or more along with gold-plated stock options was limiting how much they could use the software their company was developing.
Especially when the software they're developing is supposed to speed up the speed at which the software they are developing is developed.
It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".
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Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.
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well, not only their software but also hardware resources they're renting, but I agree they don't.
Tokens aren’t free.
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Pretty sure I have seen them imply in one of the panel discussions on their YouTube channel (can't remember which) that they get unlimited use of the best models. I remember them talking about records for the most spent in a day or something.
Owning the means of cognition is going to be more and more importan as it allows one to scale more than linearly.
Outsiders will be tied to limited or pay per use because owning the means of cognition will be a massive extractive economy
> is this the case for Anthropic employees?
Not sure about all Anhropic employees, but that must definitely be the case for Boris Cherny.
Its not unlimited, the compute allocation was one of the reason for the coup at OpenAI
Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.
It is the case that Anthropic employees have no usage limits. Some people do experiments where they spawn up hundreds of Claude instances just to see if any of them succeed.
Are they using these tests as a form of RLHF?
It would be very interesting to see the outputs of his operations. How productive is one of his agents? How long does it take to complete a task, and how often does it require steering?
I'm a bit of a skeptic. Claude Code is good, but I've had varied results during my usage. Even just 5 minutes ago, I asked CC to view the most recent commit diff using git show. Even when I provided the command, it was doing dumb shit like git show --stat and then running wc for some reason...
I've been working on something called postkit[1], which has required me to build incrementally on a codebase that started from nothing and has now grown quite a lot. As it's grown, Claude Code's performance has definitely dipped.
[1] https://github.com/varunchopra/postkit
The funniest part of that whole thing was when someone said "I trusted you, but you use light mode on your terminal" and then he replied that people stop by his desk daily just to make fun of him for it.
The irony is that light mode is objectively the correct way to use things.
I'll assume this isn't a troll, and ask you by objective measures you believe this is true?
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That depends entirely on your surroundings. Dark room? Dark mode. Next to a window or on a balcony on a sunny day? Light mode.
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Its like the space tab wars all over again.
Everyone was making fun of me in the 2000s for using a dark terminal and IDE...
I started with dark mode because that's what amber text on a terminal was... but then the big thing was UI's simulating paper and then we had a turn to dark mode but recently I've gone back to the light side.
I also use light mode in my terminal. Mock me at your leisure. :)
Another convert back to the light from the darkness here.
My eyes are getting old. Black text on white background is more legible/clear.
That was one of my first thought as well, but I was thinking that he did it for readability in the post not for real...
What I find surprising is how much human intervention the creator of Claude uses. Every time Claude does something bad we write it in claude.md so he learns from it... Why not create an agent to handle this and learn automatically from previous implementations. B: Outcome Weighting
I'm afraid to ask, but because I've been very happy with Codex 5.2 CLI and I can't imagine Claude Code doing better, why is it Claude so loved around here?
Sure, I can spend $20 and figure it out, but I already pay $40/mo for two ChatGPT subs and that's enough to get me through a month.
Should I spend $20 to see for myself?
Its faster and the coding models before 5.2 for me did not work at all. Claude models have been reliable since 3.5
I'm a late comer to AI but I started using Gemini in June 2025.
Then in december I heard from my co-workers that they were liking Claude better than any other model, and from others online, so I bought myself some Claude for xmas. And I could clearly see that it was better, right away.
That's all I know, only one model to compare with, but the difference was definitely tangible.
It codes faster and with more abandon. For good results, mix Claude Code with Codex (preferably high or xhigh reasoning) for reviews.
Thanks. The reason for my hesitancy is that I've heard that the $20 sub isn't enough for anything meaningful.
If you spend only 20 on claude code you will not get far, it will lock you out after about hour of work for session usage limits
How much would you consider a good amount? I can't really afford more than 20$ myself, but perhaps there's a better more monetarily-optimal workflow.
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Why are you asking this? Just try it. It takes maybe fifteen minutes of your time. It’s $20. There is no possible argument against $20 or fifteen minutes if the tool has a chance of being even just 10% better. You’ve spent more time typing by the comment and I responding than it would take to…just try it…
Great list of useful tips.
It's interesting that Boris doesn't mention "Agent Skills" at all. I'm still a bit confused at the difference between slash commands and Agent Skills.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills
The main difference is that slash commands are invoked by humans, whereas skills can only be invoked by the agent itself. It works kinda as conditional instructions.
As an example, I have skills that aide in adding more detail to plans/specs, debugging, and for spinning up/partitioning subagents to execute tasks. I don't need to invoke a slash command each time, and the agent can contextually know by the instructions I give it what skills to use.
In the reddit thread Boris says they’re adding the ability to call skills via slash commands in an upcoming release and that he uses the term skill and slash commands interchangeably.
"Boris: Skills = slash commands, I use them interchangeably"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q2c0ne/comment/n...
I believe slash commands are all loaded into the initial context and executed when invoked by the user. Skills on the other hand only load the name and description into initial context, and the agent (not user) determines when to invoke them, and only then is the whole skill loaded into context. So skills shift decision making to the agent and use progressive disclosure for context efficiency.
How much Codex and Claude Code are different from each other? I have been using Codex for few weeks doing experiments related to data analysis and training models with some architecture modifications. I wouldn't say I have used it extensively, but so far my experience has been good. Only annoying part has been not able to use GPU in the Codex without using `--sandbox danger-full-access` flag. Today, I started using Claude Code, and ran similar experiments as Codex. I find the interface is quite similar to Codex. However, I hit the limit quite quickly in Claude Code. I will be exploring its features further. I would appreciate if anyone can share their experience of using both tools.
Codex is heavily inspired by Claude Code. They aren't that different. They might diverge more in future.
They are quite different, Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is miles better than Codex
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How has Claude Code (as a CLI tool, not the backing models) evolved over the last year?
For me it's practically the same, except for features that I don't need, don't work that well and are context-hungry.
Meanwhile, Claude Code still doesn't know how to jump to a dependency (library's) source to obtain factual information about it. Which is actually quite easy by hand (normally it's cd'ing into a directory or unzipping some file).
So, this wasteful workflow only resulted in vibecoded, non-core features while at the domain level, Claude Code remains overly agnostic if not stupid.
Why stop at 5-10? Make it 5 billion - 10 billion parallel agents. PR number go up
Frankly Claude code is painfully slow. To the point I get frustrated.
On large codebases I often find it taking 20+ minutes to do basic things like writing tests.
Way too often people are like it takes 2 minutes for it to do a full pr. Yeah how big is the code base actually.
I also have a coworker who is about 10x more then everyone else. Burning through credits yet he is one of the lowest performers.{closing in on around 1k worth of credits a day now).
$1,000.00 of credits per-day?? $200,000 per year? Those are bonkers numbers for someone not performing at a high level (on-top of their salary). Do you know what they are doing?
Yup. The way he works is all tasks he is issued in a sprint he just fires them through opus in parallel hoping to get a hit on Claude magically solving the ticket having them constantly be iterated on them. He doesnt even try using proper having plans be created.
Often time tickets get fleshed out or requirements change. He just throws everything out and reshoves it into Claude.
I weep for the planet.
They should just be on the $200 a month Max plan
Warm take for sure, but I feel that LLMs and agents have made me a worse programmer as a whole. I am enjoying the less mental strain as I do my hobbies like sketching/art while the LLM is running. But definitely it isn't making me any faster.
I'm at the point of considering another job but I just fear that my skills have deteriorated to the point that I can't pass any (manual) coding assessments anymore
I don't understand how these setups scale longterm, and even more so for the average user. The latter is relevant because, as he points out, his setup isn't that far out of reach of the average person - it's still fairly close to out of the box claude code, and opus.
But between the model qualities varying, the pricing, the timing, the tools constantly changing, I think it's really difficult to build the institutional knowledge and setup that can be used beyond a few weeks.
In the era of AI, I don't tink it's good enough to "have" a working product. It's also important to have all the other things that make a project way more productive, like stellar documentation, better abstractions, clearer architecture. In terms of AI, there's gotta be something better than just a markdown file with random notes. Like what happens when an agent does something because it's picking something up from some random slack convo, or some minor note in a 10k claude.md file. It just seems like the wild west where basic ideas like additional surface area being a liability is ignored because we're too early in the cycle.
tl;dr If it's just pushing around typical mid-level code, then... I just think that's falling behind.
I'm a bit jealous. I would like to experiment with having a similar setup, but 10x Opus 4.5 running practically non stop must amount to a very high inference bill. Is it really worth the output?
From experimentation, I need to coach the models quite closely in order to get enough value. Letting it loose only works when I've given very specific instructions. But I'm using Codex and Clai, perhaps Claude code is better.
I have a coworker who is basically doing this right now he leads our team and is second place overall. Regularly runs opus in parallel he alone is burning through 1k worth of credits a day.
He is also one of our worst performers.
Wait, what is he second place at?
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I've tried running a number of claude's in paralell on a CRUD full stack JS app. Yes, it got features made faster, yes it definitely did not leave me enough time to acutally look at what they did, yes it definitely produced sub-par code.
At the moment with one claude + manually fixing crap it produces I am faster at solving "easier" features (Think add API endpoint, re-build API client, implement frontend logic for API endpoint + UI) faster than if I write it myself.
Things that are more logic dense, it tends to produce so many errors that it's faster to solve myself.
> manually fixing crap it produces
> it tends to produce so many errors
I get some of the skepticism in this thread, but I don't get takes like this. How are you using cc that the output you look at is "full of errors"? By the time I look at the output of a session the agent has already ran linting, formatting, testing and so on. The things I look at are adherence to the conventions, files touched, libraries used, and so on. And the "error rate" on those has been steadily coming down. Especially if you also use a review loop (w/ codex since it has been the best at review lately).
You have to set these things up for success. You need loops with clear feedback. You need a project that has lots of clear things to adhere to. You need tight integrations. But once you have these things, if you're looking at "errors", you're doing something wrong IMO.
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Yeah, doesn't this guy work for Anthropic? He'd get to use 10x Opus 4.5 for free.
I’ve found that experienced devs use agentic coding in a more “hands-on” way than beginners and pure vibe-coders.
Vibecoders are the best because they push the models in humorous and unexpected ways.
Junior devs are like “I automated the deploy process via an agent and this markdown file”
Seasoned devs will spend more time writing the prompt for a bug fix, or lazily paste the error and then make the 1-line change themselves.
The current crop of LLMs are more powerful than any of these use cases, and it’s exciting to see experienced devs start to figure that out (I’m not stanning Gas Town[0], but it’s a glimpse of the potential).
[0]https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
Partially related: I really dislike the vibe of Gas Town, both the post and the tool, I really hope this isn't what the future looks like. It just feels disappointing.
Boris is a power user's power user.
I would highly recommend every project maintain a simple, well-written AGENTS.md file. At first it may seem like a more nitpicky README, but you will quickly see how much coding agents benefit from this added context. Imo, the two most important things to include in AGENTS.md are frequent commands and verification methods.
A third thing I've started adding to my projects is a list of related documentation and libraries that may not be immediately obvious. Things like confluence pages and other repos associated with the project.
I had this ShowHN yesterday, which didn't grab much attention, so i'm using this opportunity as it seems relevant (it is a solution for running CC in parallel)
if you folks like to run parallel claude-code sessions, and like native terminal like Ghostty, i have a solution for using Git Worktree natively with Ghostty, it is called agentastic.dev, and it has a built-in Worktree/IDE/Diff/Codereview around Ghostty (macos only for now).
Would be happy to answer any questions
ShowHN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501758
That's just unrealistic. If i were to use it like this as an actual end user i would get stopped by rate limits/those weekly / session limits instantly
One thing that’s helped me is creating a bake-off. I’ll do it between Claude and codex. Same prompt but separate environments. They’ll both do their thing and then I’ll score them at the end. I find it helps me because frequently only one of them makes a mistake, or one of them finds an interesting solution. Then once I declare a winner I have scripts to reset the bake-off environments.
you can have them review each other's work, too.
10-15 parallel Opus 4.5 instances running almost full-time? Even if you could get it, what would be the monthly bill for that?
One of my side projects has been to recover a K&R C computer algebra system from the 1980's, port to modern 64-bit C. I'd have eight tabs at a time assigned files from a task server, to make passes at 60 or so files. This nearly worked; I'm paused till I can have an agent with a context window that can look at all the code at once. Or I'll attempt a fresh translation based on what I learned.
With a $200 monthly Max subscription, I would regularly stall after completing significant work, but this workflow was feasible. I tried my API key for an hour once; it taught me to laugh at the $200 as quite a deal.
I agree that Opus 4.5 is the only reasonable use of my time. We wouldn't hire some guy off the fryer line to be our CTO; coding needs best effort.
Nevertheless, I thought my setup was involved, but if Boris considers his to be vanilla ice cream then I'm drinking skim milk.
Having the 5 instances going at once sounds like Google Antigravity.
I haven't used Claude Code too much. One snag I found is the tendency when running into snags to fix them incorrectly by rolling back to older versions of things. I think it would benefit from an MCP server for say Maven Central. Likewise it should prefer to generate code using things like project scaffolding tooling whenever possible.
How come that Claude Code isn't open source?
I can't imagine that it has some kind of special access to Anthropic's servers and that it does things an API-user can't do, maybe except for the option to use the Claude.ai credits/quota.
Even their Agent SDK just wraps the `claude`-executable, IIRC.
I spent a whole day running 3x local CC sessions and about 7 Claude code web sessions over the day. This was the most heavy usage day ever for me, about 30 pull requests created and merged over 3 projects.
I got a lot done, but my brain was fried after that. Like wired but totally exhausted.
Has anyone else experienced this and did you find strategies to help (or find that it gets easier)?
Did you manage to make proper reviews of all the 30 PR ?
I have formal requirements for all implemented code. This is all on relatively greenfield solo developed codebases with tools I know inside out (Django, click based cli etc) so yes. Thanks so much for your concern, internet person!
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I think we all know the answer to that.
what cc plan do you use? the20$?
Max 5x ($100)
This feels like the desperate, look at me! post, which is the exact opposite of Andrej Karpathy's recent tweet[0] about feeling left behind as a programmer, as covered on Hacker News[1].
I guess would want to see how sustainable this 5 parallel AI effort is, and are there demonstrably positive outcomes. There are plenty of "I one-shotted this" examples of something that already (mostly) existed, which are very impressive in their own right, but I haven't seen a lot of truly novel creations.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395714
I wonder what sort of problems you must have to get this upset about the creator of a particular software telling people how they personally use that software
Personally I keep open several tabs of CC but it's not often that more than one or two of them would be running at the same time. It's just to keep particular context around for different parts of the same application since it's quite big (I don't use CC for creating new projects). For example if I had it work on a feature and then I realized there was a bug or an adjustment in the same files that needed to be made then I can just go back to that tab hours or maybe even days later without digging through history
> I assume "what sort of problems you must have" was directed at me.
I don't really have any sort of personal problem with Boris' post, if what your inflammatory statement was implying.
I also think it was a fairly good description of his workflow, technically speaking, but also glosses over the actual monetary costs of what he is doing, and also as noted above, doesn't really describe the actual outcomes other than a lot of PRs.
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This post brings another opinion to the thread and contributes to the discussion of pros and cons. Please stop downvoting because you disagree.
This isnt reddit No need for another fanatic echo chamber on the web.
Needlessly condescending post of someone sharing their self-proclaimed vanilla setup of iterm with a handful of tabs.
But hey, if it makes you happy.
>Most sessions start in Plan mode
I don't get why they added a Plan mode. Even without it, you can just ask claude to "make a plan" from where you can iterate on it.
Also is it really that much faster to type "/commit-push-pr" than it is to type "commit, push and make a pr" ?
It’s really a convenience to force the model to use the planning tool and it prevents edit/write tools until the user approves the plan, like an inverse of “auto accept edits” mode.
Ao this guy is personally responsible for the RAM shortage, it seems. Jokes aside, i have a similar setup, but with a mix of claude and a local model. Claude can access the local model for simple and repetitive tasks, and it actually does a good job on testing UI. Great way to save tokens.
I have to say it sounds insane. 5 tabs of claude, back and forth from terminal to browser - and no actual workflow detailed. Are we to believe that claude is making changes in parallel to one codebase, and if so - why?
I actually use dozens of claude codes "in parallel" myself (most are sitting idle for a lot of the time though). I set up a web interface and then made it usable by others at clodhost.com if anybody wants to try it (free)!
It'd be nice if he explained the cost to be running 10 agents all day.
Yeah... I had a fairly in-depth conversation with Claude a couple of days ago about Claude Code and the way it works, and usage limits, and comparison to how other AI coding tools work, and the extremely blunt advice from Claude was that Claude Code was not suitable for serious software development due to usage limits! (props to Anthropic for not sugar coating it!)
Maybe on the Max 20x plan it becomes viable, and no doubt on the Boris Cherny unlimited usage plan it does, but it seems that without very aggressive non-stop context pruning you will rapidly hit limits and the 5-hour timeout even working with a single session, let alone 5 Claude Code sessions and another 5-10 web ones!
The key to this is the way that Claude Code (the local part) works and interacts with Claude AI (the actual model, running in the cloud). Basically Claude Code maintains the context, comprising mostly of the session history, contents of source files it has accessed, and the read/write/edit tools (based on Node.js) it is providing for Claude AI. This entire context, including all files that have been read, and the tools definitions, are sent to Claude AI (eating into your token usage limit) with EVERY request, so once Claude Code has accessed a few source files then the content of those files will "silently" be sent as part of every subsequent request, regardless of what it is. Claude gave me an example of where with 3 smallish files open (a few thousand lines of code), then within 5 requests the token usage might be 80,000 or so, vs the 40,000 limit of the Pro plan or 200,000 limit of the Max 5x plan. Once you hit limit then you have to wait 5 hours for a usage reset, so without Cherny's infinite usage limit this becomes a game of hurry up and wait (make 5 requests, then wait 5 hours and make 5 more).
You can restrict what source files Claude Code has access to, to try to manage context size (e.g. in a C++ project, let it access all the .h module definition files, but block all the .cpp ones) as well as manually inspecting the context all the time to see what is being sent that can be removed. I believe there is some automatic context compaction happening periodically too, but apparently not enough to prevent many/most people hitting usage time outs when working on larger projects.
Not relevant here, but Claude also explained how Cursor manages to provide fast/cheap autocomplete using it's own models by building a vector index of the code base to only pull relevant chunks of code into the context.
he's probably on the max plan ;)
so... what's he actually doing with 10 terminals of claude code?
Working on Claude Code?
Yo dawg, we heard you like for Code to code Code for you.
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The PostToolUse hook tip for formatting Claude's code is the only actual tip here. Everything else reads like marketing copy.
That’s in the docs though
very interesting discussion I don't know how can you keep up with all the comments ^_^ so I create a review with pros and cons https://gist.github.com/notjulian/3a623d7889e5971d4b9fd1aac9...
Does anyone know if it’s possible to have “ultrathink” be the default instead of saying it in every prompt?
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007892431031988385?s=20 Seems to be moved to the default now. PSA for anyone who didn't see
Put it in CLAUDE.md because that just gets added to the prompt
Ah, thank you! Now I feel like an idiot. I guess I was thinking “ultrathink” was a specially interpreted command within claude code (sort of like a slash command).
He is singlehandedly responsible for using up an entire city's worth of power and water this way?
It’s his marketing budget.
Absolute madness and no thank you.
Have others not noticed the extremely obvious astroturfing campaign specifically promoting Claude code that is mostly happening on X in recent days/weeks?
A classic hacker news post that will surely interest coders from all walks of life! ~
After regular use of an AI coding assistant for some time, I see something unusual: my biggest wins came from neither better prompts nor a smarter model. They originated from the way I operated.
At first, I thought of it as autocomplete. Afterwards, similar to a junior developer. In the end, a collaborator who requires constraints.
Here is a framework I have landed on.
First Step: Request for everything. Obtain acceleration, but lots of noise.
Stage two: Include regulations. Less Shock, More Trust.
Phase 3: Allow time for acting but don’t hesitate to perform reviews aggressively.
A few habits that made a big difference.
Specify what can be touched or come into contact with.
Asking it to explain differences before applying them.
Consider “wrong but confident” answers as signal to tighten scope.
Wondering what others see only after time.
What transformations occurred after the second or fourth week?
When was the trust increased or reduced?
What regulations do you wish you had added earlier?
why he open multiple tab? is it means he gives multiple task to them?
it means he develope 5 to 10 features for same repo
Bun is the new Yarn?
I'm sure this works for people and I'm happy for them but this sounds like absolute hell to me.
Just take out everything that I like about SWE and then just leave me to do the stuff I hate.
The amount of people holding strong opinions on LLMs who openly admit they have not tried the state of the art tools is so high on Hacker news right now, that it's refreshing to get actual updates from the tool's creators.
I read a comment yesterday that said something like "many people tried LLMs early on, it was kind of janky and so they gave up, thinking LLMs are bad". They were probably right at the time, but the tech _has_ improved since then, while those opinions have not changed much.
So, yes claude code and sonnet/opus 4.5 is another step change that you should try out. For $20/month you can run claude code in the terminal and regular claude on the web app.
Let's stop linking to a pedophile-enabling website like X please
"My setup might be surprisingly vanilla! Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. "
Well, of course he doesn't need to customize it. It's already working the way he wants it, seeing as how he created it
> [I'm] the creator of Claude Code.
but also
> Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much.
Am I the only one to notice the irony of this juxtaposition?
For lots of software unless you really know what you are doing it's best to just leave the default settings alone and not dig too deep into what's not immediately intended to do. For my application lots of bug reports come from people using our advanced settings without reading any of the instructions at all and screwing it up
So in the case of him being the creator obviously he built it for his needs
What’s ironic? He made a good product that works well without needing to configure it?
He doesn't need to configure it because he made his preferences the default.
Another Claude related article. It's starting to feel like spam now.
I'm a heavy claude code user but this is starting to smell like BS. There is nothing special in claude code, opus is a good model and with lots of requests it can give good results. There is nothing unique to it.
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Absolutely shocking... Boris uses a light themed terminal?! Kidding aside, these were great tips. I am quite intrigued by the handing off of local Claude sessions to the web version. I wonder if this feature exists for the other Coding CLI agents.
I doubt he’d use Claude code as it is. I’m sure he’d upgrade to think harder and do more iterations and go deeper. Codex for example already does that but could go deeper a bit longer to figure out more.