[sdoering]

What specific improvements are you hoping for? Without them (in the original forum post) giving concrete examples, prompts, or methodology – just stating "I write good prompts" – it's hard to evaluate or even help them.

They came in primed against agentic work flow. That is fine. But they also came in without providing anything that might have given other people the chance to show that their initial assumptions was flawed.

I've been working with agents daily for several months. Still learning what fails and what works reliably.

Key insights from my experience: - You need a framework (like agent-os or similar) to orchestrate agents effectively - Balance between guidance and autonomy matters - Planning is crucial, especially for legacy codebases

Recent example: Hit a wall with a legacy system where I kept maxing out the context window with essential background info. After compaction, the agent would lose critical knowledge and repeat previous mistakes.

Solution that worked: - Structured the problem properly - Documented each learning/discovery systematically - Created specialized sub-agents for specific tasks (keeps context windows manageable)

Only then could the agent actually help navigate that mess of legacy code.

[rafaelmn]

So at what point are you doing more work on the agent than working on the code directly ? And what are you losing in the process of shifting from the code author to LLM manager ?

My experience is that once I switch to this mode when something blows up I'm basically stuck with a bunch of code that I sort of know, even tough I reviewed it. I just don't have the same insight as I would if I wrote the code, no ownership, even if it was committed in my name. Like any misconceptions I've had about how things work I will still have because I never had to work through the solution, even if I got the final working solution.

[cruffle_duffle]

My thoughts exactly. They generate a pile of sludge if left to their own devices. Sludge that you will take incredible amounts of time to understand.

The amount of tech debt these things accumulate unchecked is massive.

In some places it doesn’t matter, in some places it matters a lot.

[tossandthrow]

With all that additional work, would you assess you have been more cost effective as just doing these tasks yourself with an Ai companion?

[hitarpetar]

sounds like a huge waste of time

[sdoering]

YMMV