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Comment by robbomacrae | Hacker News Reader

This looks really interesting and a unique take on the AI agent orchestration. I think we need a bunch of experiments in this area as it's clear we are entering a new paradigm and the tools for it are lacking. The session tree in particular has merits.

I've got my own attempt with OrcaBot (short for orchestration of bots). It's also been a 6 month solo build experiment. I'm not trying to plug.. just that I'm also neck deep in Steve Yegge's Stage 8 AI-assisted coding chart and understand how much thought and effort went into this.

Thinking about where this is all going with talking to AI like fully autonomous employees similar to @Claude can you see a comms app type approach that combines something like slack with your tree/thread structure? It's somewhat orthogonal to your "inspect everything" but could intersect by bringing click through/open in options...

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TBH I'm not coming from the same angle as all the gas-town fever-dream agent swarming stuff. I'm much more on the hands-on coding side, I tend to do one thing at a time and still do the git commits myself. So that's the UX I'm dogfooding..

However I see all those people out there trying to build these huge agent orchestration schemes, and if juggler's extension system can do that (or could be made to do that with a few tweaks) I'd be really interested in helping that to happen

I think I'm more on your side on that rather than letting agents go wild like Steve Yegge/Pete Steinberger do. In fact OrcaBot quickly adapted into a knee jerk reaction to OpenClaw because I saw that as inherently dangerous.

But with regard to Juggler and orchestration, have you seen "claude agents" (started in the terminal as claude agents instead of just claude). I ask because your tree like approach has similarities to how claude agents manages claude agents/subagents doing tasks with the ability to drill down in to each at a time which is why for me its not such a leap from what you already have.

I think that's basically the same as juggler's subthreads. As it progresses I'll work my way through all these kinds of thing and dig into whether there are things I can add or tweak to match their features. I'm aiming to make juggler's extension API flexible enough to support pretty much anything

I'm also on the hands on side. The mistake that I see a lot of people making is "I can build so much now". But that doesn't mean you're building the right things. And if you're hands off you aren't really thinking about what you're trying to build, at least not deeply. I'd love to see tools that embrace optimizing for that.

I totally agree with this hands-on take. The gas-town stuff is super cool experimentally, but it seems to ignore the the more fundamental challenge of getting the human idea into software form. I think is part of the reason we keep seeing Kanban boards show up: as a human, I still want to be able to specify, prioritize, and track what is getting built. I have been experimenting with this with Overlord (https://github.com/cooperativ-labs/Overlord), I keep running into this same boundary between automating and specifying, and increasingly, just being able to keep track of what got done.

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