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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

The author is lying. My team and I are heavy users of Claude code and other agents and it ain’t like this. You need to manage an AI coding agent carefully and course correct frequently. There are cases for parallel agents but they are tasks like parallel document fetches and summarization, and other tasks that don’t require supervision.

The idea of having multiple parallel agents merge pull requests or resolve issues in parallel is still just an idea.

Please don’t post or upvote attention seeking crap like this. It gives a very exciting and promising technology a bad name.

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Your comment is disproportionately rude. Just because your team can't leverage multiple coding agents doesn't mean no one else can.

And even if OP also can't, this is a good place to discuss possible problems and solutions for parallel development using coding agents.

Please refrain from gatekeeping.

“With this approach, I can manage to have 10–20 pull requests open at once, each handled by a dedicated agent.”

A quote from the post. No, I think my post is calibrated quite well considering what OPs post does to our industry.

Having 20 PRs open at once doesn't necessarily mean managing 20 agents simultaneously.

It can mean, for example, that 2 agents worked for some time in a list of 20 TODO features and produced 20 PRs to be reviewed. They could have worked overnight even.

You're seemingly judging from the least generous interpretation, which is not constructive and is also against HN guidelines fyi.

I’m not ok with someone self promoting here at the cost of thousands of people thinking they’re either not smart enough, or are doing something incorrectly. We saw this same pattern during the dot com boom a quarter century ago with self promoters creating a “you just don’t get it” culture which eventually collapsed like a house of cards. What we share should be reproducible by others and we should avoid hand wavey excitement without substance. Especially here on HN where many of the next great companies and ideas will be born.

Technology evolves. At some point there's going to be things that other people are doing that you can't replicate yet. That doesn't mean you're not smart enough. But it might mean that you are doing something wrong. Often though, you just got to try different things or wait for methodologies to consolidate and become mainstream.

Even if parallel agents is not something easily done currently, debating about ways to do it is constructive enough for me.

Exactly! To make it more clear, here is how I approach my day:

9-10am: I comb through our issue list, figuring out which issues are well defined, which need more input or design decision. => I pick a hand-full, lets say 10 that I kick off to run in the background, and lets say another 10 for further specification.

10-2pm: I thinker with 10 issues to figure out the exact specs and to expand the requirement list.

2pm-6pm: I review the code written by the agents, one by one. I kick off for further work things that need more input, or merge things that look good.

No. Unfortunately there’s a problem now of people blatantly lying about the ability of LLMs to get attention. And it’s extremely effective.

I say this as someone who uses them every day for programming and is also excited now and for the future possibilities. The just blatant lying needs to stop though and needs to be called out.

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