Ask HN: How to get the most intelligence out of your agents?

3•thechairman12•1h ago

I often find chatgpt.com has greater "intelligence" than codex.

I've found this to be true for the past year or two now, and I was wondering if anyone has found a better solution than copying context to and from chatgpt.com. The "Pro" level (or whatever the max level is at the time) consistently has better insights than the agent, but immensely limited tool calling compared to the agent. Marrying the two of these together unlocks a lot of potential, but I really just want this intelligence to live on my laptop, instead of me being the intermediary.

Comments

verdverm•26m ago

Someone once said, "give your agents good tools and context" and get out of the way. I would add, "stay in the loop friends"

I don't use Oai/Ant products or models, open weight absolutist that I am, but I would focus on your terminal workflows, custom tools, and repo context like AGENTS.md as a starting place. For tools, focus on moving deterministic workflows to scripts they can use, instead of having them do them differently each time based on markdown. You'll save yourself a lot of tokens and strife in the process.

qwerpy•3m ago

This is good advice and I wish I had read it before today. I use the state of the art model (Opus 5.5) and telling it with words how to interact with my issue tracker and my repo is not working. Mostly because of its overly restrictive auto-mode guardrails and brittle command whitelisting, but also a lot of “oops, I didn’t read the doc that you clearly tell me to read at the top of agents.md, I’ll make an ineffective note so this never happens again (it keeps happening)” The solution I’m using now is various scripts that encapsulate almost everything the agents usually need to do and just whitelist that one.