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Comment by oflannabhra | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of little projects and I also prefer this way of working with agents. Sometimes I would start to interrogate on a specific portion or ask questions to better understand a concept, and the session would get poisoned and the agent would fixate on that topic for all the remaining turns.

I asked fable to look at my interaction patterns and clearly stated my frustrations and the problems I wanted solved, and it designed a simple process to track things in git and built a couple simple session hook skills. It’s pretty lightweight and I’ve been very happy with it for a couple months.

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The power of this mode of work is that after you deconstruct the task into smaller subtasks, it's a lot easier to use cheaper models to implement that task.

I get a long way using models like Opus to make a plan of action and a bunch of tasks, and then using Deepseek to implement that plan of action. Saves a bunch of money and is fast.

Yep! The other big advantages for me:

- I have a record of work done and work to be done that helps _me_ when I come back to the project after several months. It’s committed and lives with the code.

- when a task inevitably ends up more complicated than I thought, I can in that session break it up

- I initiate sessions from multiple computers, so things stay in sync (through git)

- I also have a “tooling” repo that builds out some views of the work and hosts it for me to see when I’m on my phone.

- The hooks let the agent manage all of the workflow/task management, so there’s very little management overhead for me.

I rejected beads and JIRA. I wanted something more lightweight.

What do the session hooks do?

- start: invokes `work brief` skill to put the current tasks into context

- pre-compact: does the same so work state survives compaction

- stop: lints the work-tracking yaml files to make sure that updates mid session don't break

Nice. I found myself doing a lot of repetitive stuff handing off between agents, time to fix that. I think I agree with your approach of keeping it lean.

I also sometimes rewind the conversation after going off on a tangent, sometimes not if I want the agent to have the sorts of things I’m thinking about in context. I probably justify keeping too much crud in context than I should

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