I haven't used it since it became paid, but back then Junie was slow and thoughtful, while Cursor was constantly re-writing files that worked fine, and Claude was somewhere in the middle

The author has done a pretty good job of reverse engineering Claude Code and explaining the architecture.

update: changed the link to a better repo

Still work in progress, but I'm already using it to code itself. Feedback welcome.

i hate how LangChain has always tried to make things that are simple seem very complicated, and all the unnecessary new terminology and concepts they've pushed, but whatever sells LangSmith.

1. You need a good LLM for base knowledge.

2. You need a good system prompt to guide/focus the LLM (create an agent).

3. If you need some functionality that doesn't make any decisions, create a tool.

4. If the agent + tools flows get too wily, break it down into smaller domains by spawning sub agents with focused prompts and (less?) tools.

Main takeaways (which I'd love feedback on) are:

There are series of agents recently (claude code, manus, deep research) which execute tasks over longer time horizons particular well

At the core of it, it's just an LLM running in a loop calling tools... but when you try to do this naively (or at least, when I try to do it) the LLM struggles with doing long/complex tasks

So how do these other agents accomplish it?

These agents all do similar things, namely:

1. They use a planning tool

2. They use sub agents

3. They use a file system like thing to offload context

4. They have a detailed system prompt (prompting isn't dead!)

I don't think any of these things individually is novel... but I also think that they are not super common place to do when building agents. And the combination of them is (I think) an interesting insight!

Would love any feedback :)

Now that its increasingly clear that writing MCP servers isn't a winning strategy, people need a new way to jump on the band wagon as easily as possible.

Writing your own agent like geminin and claude code is the new hotness right now.

- low barrier to entry (tick)

- does something reasonably useful (tick)

- doesnt require any deep ai knowledge or skill (tick)

- easy to hype (tick)

Its like “cursor but for X” but easier to ship.

Were going to see a tonne of coding agents built this way, but my intuition is, and what Ive seen so far, is theyre not actually introducing anything novel.

Maybe having a quick start like this is good, because it drops the value of an unambitious direct claude code clone to zero.

I like it.