Comment by themgt
7 days ago
It's sort of insane though, you not only have dozens/hundreds of stochastic agents running on your machine, but you cannot even inspect the instructions those agents are working off of?
I've gone in to look at Claude subagent/workflows and sometimes been like "no this was a mistake to spin up" ... Codex users just get to token yolo the encrypted telephone operator instructions+shell from orchestrator to subagents?
>but you cannot even inspect the instructions those agents are working off of?
It makes more sense when you realize they don't want developers to be doing any coding at all. That's what they seem to be moving towards. From product manager to product via AI.
Last stage is moving everyone to their cloud platforms, they deploy everything for you, you don't even get to see the code, just the deployed end product.
Because letting you look at the code would be too dangerous, you could reverse engineer an exploit to another product! Or distill their internet-distilled model!
But don't worry, at least it will be very convenient.
no, last stage is removing you completely from the equation
They’ve already succeeded at that. My time spent manually writing and editing code must be down 99% post Opus 4.7.
You already have an agent freely doing stuff on your machine. Subagents prompts are a weird place to draw a line. It's not like you're reading everything the agent is doing in any case, let's not kid ourselves.
When things go wrong I very much read the session traces to figure out what in my prompt wasn't good/explicit enough, then retry to evaluate if it would have helped.
I was about to do the same with Sol + Ultra, but then discovered this encryption issue that prevents me from doing the same for sub-agents.
> It's not like you're reading everything the agent is doing in any case
Personally I do, these tools aren't mature enough to be used without supervision
> You already have an agent freely doing stuff on your machine
No. Agents run in VMs. Assume anywhere you’re running an agent will be compromised, because eventually, it will be.
The only reason most people haven’t is luck, they didn’t happen to install Axios or Tanstack at a certain time.