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Comment by daemonologist | Hacker News Reader

Personally, it takes me longer to write the specifications than it takes the model to implement them (and it takes me much longer to review the resulting code, although maybe that makes me old-fashioned). Consequently I do not have enough tasks to run more than one agent at a time.

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Exactly. I don't understand how so many developers seem to have a long tail of well written task specifications ready to submit to the LLM. Who produces them?

LLMs are good at cleaning up tech debt. Give them lots of small refactorings or dig out those crusty old P4 tickets. There's a lot of easy stuff for them that requires very little specification and very high probability they'll get it right the first time, especially if you can point them at an example done right.

You don't need to have well written specifications. Just need to point it in the right direction and to know what you are doing so you can ask it to generate a plan, review and then ask it to implement.

I have conversations with a smart model, and then the model writes the spec. I review and approve the spec, and it dispatches.

For a concrete example, check out this random plan [0]. A detailed spec followed by the exact implementation tasks that will be executed by the subagents.

[0]: https://github.com/bensyverson/woodcase/blob/main/project/20...

I'm exactly in this situation, and at the same time I get so many jumpscares when reviewing the code that I'm not going to stop anytime soon.

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