If code is a liability and the best part is no part, what about leveraging Markdown files only?
The last programs I created were just CLI agents with Markdown files and MCP servers(some code here but very little).
The feedback loop is much faster, allowing me to understand what I want after experiencing it, and self-correction is super fast. Plus, you don't get lost in the implementation noise.
It's no different to inheriting a legacy application though. As well, from the perspective of a product owner, it's not a new risk.
I don't trust Claude to write reams of code that I can't maintain except when that code is embarrassingly testable, i.e it has an external source of truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo
Have a great day =3
I advise people to only use subagents for stuff that is very compartmentalized because they're hard to monitor and prone to failure with complex codebases where agents live and die by project knowledge curated in files like CLAUDE.md. If your main Claude instance doesn't give a good handoff to a subagent, or a subagent doesn't give a good handback to the main Claude, shit will go sideways fast.
Also, don't lean on agents for refactoring. Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly.
Like "evaluate the test coverage" or "check if the project follows the style guide".
This way the "main" context only gets the report and doesn't waste space on massive test outputs or reading multiple files.
Chat completion sends the full prompt history on every call.
I am working on my own coding agent and seeing massive improvements by rewriting history using either a smaller model or a freestanding call to the main one.
It really mitigates context poisoning.
Which as far as I understand it is summarizing the context with a smaller model.
Am I misunderstanding you, as the practical experience of most people seem to contradict your results.
Very much this. I tried to get Claude to move some code from one file to another. Some of the code went missing. Some of it was modified along the way.
Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!) so they can't do this.
Claude can only reliably do this refactoring if it can keep the start and end files in context. This was a large file, so it got lost. Even then it needs direct supervision.
> "Managing Cost and Usage Limits: Chaining agents, especially in a loop, will increase your token usage significantly. This means you’ll hit the usage caps on plans like Claude Pro/Max much faster. You need to be cognizant of this and decide if the trade-off—dramatically increased output and velocity at the cost of higher usage—is worth it."
Ideally I would like to spin off multiple agents to solve multiple bugs or features. The agents have to use the ci in GitHub to get feedback on tests. And I would like to view it on IDE because I like the ability to understand code by jumping through definitions.
Support for multiple branches at once - I should be able to spin off multiple agents that work on multiple branches simultaneously.
Last week I asked Claude Code to set up a Next.js project with internationalization. It tried to install a third party library instead of using the internationalization method recommended for the latest version of Next.js (using Next's middleware) and could not produce of functional version of the boilerplate site.
There are some specific cases where agentic AI does help me but I can't picture an agent running unchecked effectively in its current state.
zachwills•3d ago
bazhand•3d ago