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Comment by linsomniac

11 hours ago

In my view, these agent teams have really only become mainstream in the last ~3 weeks since Claude Code released them. Before that they were out there but were much more niche, like in Factory or Ralphie Wiggum.

There is a component to this that keeps a lot of the software being built with these tools underground: There are a lot of very vocal people who are quick with downvotes and criticisms about things that have been built with the AI tooling, which wouldn't have been applied to the same result (or even poorer result) if generated by human.

This is largely why I haven't released one of the tools I've built for internal use: an easy status dashboard for operations people.

Things I've done with agent teams: Added a first-class ZFS backend to ganeti, rebuilt our "icebreaker" app that we use internally (largely to add special effects and make it more fun), built a "filesystem swiss army knife" for Ansible, converted a Lambda function that does image manipulation and watermarking from Pillow to pyvips, also had it build versions of it in go, rust, and zig for comparison sake, build tooling for regenerating our cache of watermarked images using new branding, have it connect to a pair of MS SQL test servers and identify why logshipping was broken between them, build an Ansible playbook to deploy a new AWS account, make a web app that does a simple video poker app (demo to show the local users group, someone there was asking how to get started with AI), having it brainstorm and build 3 versions of a crossword-themed daily puzzle (just to see what it'd come up with, my wife and I are enjoying TiledWords and I wanted to see what AI would come up with).

Those are the most memorable things I've used the agent teams to build in the last 3 weeks. Many of those things are internal tools or just toys, as another reply said. Some of those are publicly released or in progress for release. Most of these are in addition to my normal work, rather than as a part of it.

4 comments

linsomniac

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schipperai  10 hours ago

Further, my POV is that coding agents crossed a chasm only last December with Opus 4.5 release. Only since then these kinds of agent teams setups actually work. It’s early days for agent orchestration

gooob  7 hours ago

can you tell us about this "ansible filesystem swiss army knife"?

  • linsomniac  4 hours ago

    I'd be happy to! I find in my playbooks that it is fairly cumbersome to set up files and related because of the module distinction between copying files, rendering templates, directories... There's a lot of boilerplate that has to be repeated.

    For 3-4 years I've been toying with this in various forms. The idea is a "fsbuilder" module that make a task that logically groups filesystem setup (as opposed to grouping by operation as the ansible.builtin modules do).

    You set up in the main part of the task the defaults (mode, owner/group, etc), then in your "loop" you list the fs components and any necessary overrides for the defaults. The simplest could for example be:

        - name: Set up app config
      linsomniac.fsbuilder.fsbuilder:
        dest: /etc/myapp.conf

    Which defaults to a template with the source of "myapp.conf.j2". But you can also do more complex things like:

        - name: Deploy myapp - comprehensive example with loop
      linsomniac.fsbuilder.fsbuilder:
        owner: root
        group: myapp
        mode: a=rX,u+w
      loop:
        - dest: /etc/myapp/conf.d
          state: directory
        - dest: /etc/myapp/config.ini
          validate: "myapp --check-config %s"
          backup: true
          notify: Restart myapp
        - dest: /etc/myapp/version.txt
          content: "version={{ app_version }}"
        - dest: "/etc/myapp/passwd"
          group: secrets

    I am using this extensively in our infrastructure and run ~20 runs a day, so it's fairly well tested.

    More information at: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/linsomniac/fsbu...