Comment by modo_
1 day ago
I think there are a lot of people using AI who aren't as familiar with these tools as us. We stop noticing a lot of the complexity when we pick it up gradually. There are so many powerful capabilities built into codex/ claude code that have little or no UI affordance.
it's tons of small things like choosing the right effort level for a task. or knowing when to ask for subagents. oh, you can have two threads working at the same time and communicating with each other? you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
which of these things happens automatically, and which do you need to ask for? and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
the list goes on forever. many users of AI are only just now getting comfortable with skills (and probably still writing bad skills unfortunately hah).
A lot of the specific things you learned may have become obsolete. But there's still a gap between what these tools can do and what most people know how to get them to do. Keeping up with that is a skill too, but perhaps not forever.
> you can do /side to parallel path and fold that back into the main thread?
What's /side? Is that a Codex thing? On Claude it's not a valid command. Claude uses /btw but it can't be folded back into the main convo, sadly.
Codex /side allows you to toggle to a different pane and maintain an ephemeral or persistent side conversation at the context point which it was launched. It can't natively communicate back to the main thread though. It also allows you to fork the side chat into a new chat. I don't believe it can edit files in side chat mode so the only way to paste context back is fork and do that or just copy and paste. So similar to /btw but with other features.
Claude allows the teams feature and easily spawning co agents or subagents in tmux panes you can interact with (or send to the background). These can communicate with each other. Sometimes you can't interact with one of the tmux agents agents though if it was spawned as some specific type I can't remember.
> and does any of this still work the way it did a few months ago?
For me this is why it's not worth it investing much time and effort learning any specific AI workflow. Remember "prompt engineering"? Remember "Ralph loops"?
I'll play with various harnesses but until things settle down in a few years I'm not going to learn Claude Code the way I learned SQL.