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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress.

It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.

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Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different.

It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting. It is possible that they have worked out some way to do this, but when you have tens of tasks, merge conflicts, you are running that prompt over months, etc. At best, it doesn't work. At worst, you are burning a lot of tokens for nothing.

It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works. If you are just using OpenRouter, it is also not easy because, after setting up tools/rebuilding Claude Code, it is very challenging to setup an environment so the AI can work effectively, errors can be returned, questions returned, etc. Afaik, this is basically what Aider does...it is not easy, it is especially not easy in Claude Code which has a lot of binding choices from the business strategy that Anthropic picked.

It's natural to assume that subagents will scale to the next level of abstraction; as you mentioned, they do not.

The unlock here is tmux-based session management for the teammates, with two-way communication using agent inbox. It works very well.

> Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting.

You ask if I've tried to do this, and then set constraints that are completely different to what I described.

I have done what I described. Several times for different projects. I have a setup like that running right now in a different window.

> It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works.

It is how Claude Code works when you give it a number of sub-agents with rules for how to manage files that effectively works like task queues, or skills/mcp servers to interact with communications tools.

> it is not easy

It is not easy to do in a generic way that works without tweaks for every project and every user. It is reasonably easy to do for specific teams where you can adjust it to the desired workflows.

I can tell you based on your description that you did not do this. Subagents are completely different and cannot be used in this way.

No, it isn't how Claude Code works because Claude Code is designed to work with limited task queues, this is not what this feature is. Again, I would suggest you trying to actually build something like this. Why do you think Anthropic are doing this? They just don't understand anything about their product?

No, it doesn't work within that context. Again: sharing context between subagents, single instance running for months...I am not even sure why someone would think this could work. The constraints that I set are the ones that you require to build this...because I have done this. You are talking about having some CLAUDE.md files like you have invented the wheel, lol. HN is great.

> I can tell you based on your description that you did not do this. Subagents are completely different and cannot be used in this way.

And yet I have used them exactly in the way I described. That you assume they can't just demonstrate that you haven't tried very hard.

> No, it isn't how Claude Code works because Claude Code is designed to work with limited task queues, this is not what this feature is.

Claude allows your setup to execute arbitrary code that gets injected into context. The entire point is that you don't need to rely on built in capabilities of Claude Code to do any of this.

> No, it doesn't work within that context. Again: sharing context between subagents, single instance running for months...I am not even sure why someone would think this could work.

I know what I described works because I am doing it. You can achieve what I described in a variety of ways: Using skills to tell the agents how to access a shared communications channel. Using MCP servers. Just using CLAUDE.md and describe how to use files as a shared communications channel.

This is only difficult if you lack imagination.

> You are talking about having some CLAUDE.md files like you have invented the wheel, lol. HN is great.

No, the exact opposite: I'm saying that this isn't hard, that it isn't anything revolutionary or even special. It's pretty basic usage of the existing facilities. There's no invention there.

You're the one trying to imply this is more revolutionary than it is.

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