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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I ended up grafting the brainstorm, design, and implementation planning skills from Superpowers onto a Ralph-based implementation layer that doesn't ask for my input once the implementation plan is complete. I have to run it in a Docker sandbox because of the dangerously set permissions but that is probably a good idea anyway.

It's working, and I'm enjoying how productive it is, but it feels like a step on a journey rather than the actual destination. I'm looking forward to seeing where this journey ends up.

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I find simple Ralph loops with an implementer and a reviewer that repeat until everything passes review and unit tests is 90% of the job.

I would love to do something more sophisticated but it's ironic that when I played both agents in this loop over the past few decades, the loop got faster and faster as computers got faster and faster. Now I'm back to waiting on agentic loops just like I used to wait for compilations on large code bases.

Curious what you mean by "played both agents" and "faster and faster"? API calls are API Calls or are you running an open-source model locally?

Rephrasing of the post in case it's clearer:

"I would love to do something more sophisticated, but it's ironic that when I performed both of the duties done nowadays by agents, the development loop got faster and faster as computers got faster and faster."

For context and curiosity, are you using local inference? Which models?

If it is working, why is it just a step on a journey? What is missing?

It's a kludged-together dev process made up of two different systems in a docker container so potential damage is contained. It's not ideal ;)

Neither of those two systems feel evolved either. Superpowers is very cool, but there are holes still. And Ralph feels like an experiment that worked so they published it.

This is all going somewhere, evolving and moving towards some beautiful system. Or maybe the usual dev ecosystem shit - it'll be a great prototype and then it'll get overthought, overcomplicated and overengineered and end up less usable than what we had before *glares at React*

did you hand modify the superpowers skills or are you managing this some other way?

For me, I just created my own prompt pipeline, with a nod towards GANs all of the necessary permissions get surfaced so I don't need to babysit it, and all are relatively simple. No need for Yolo or Dangerously setting Permissions.

yeah, I coped the skills I wanted into a directory, hacked away at them until they did what I wanted, and then added them to the dockerfile for the sandbox

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