[pronik]

To the folks comparing this to GasTown: keep in mind that Steve Yegge explicitely pitched agent orchestrators to among others Anthropic months ago:

> I went to senior folks at companies like Temporal and Anthropic, telling them they should build an agent orchestrator, that Claude Code is just a building block, and it’s going to be all about AI workflows and “Kubernetes for agents”. I went up onstage at multiple events and described my vision for the orchestrator. I went everywhere, to everyone. (from "Welcome to Gas Town" https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...)

That Anthropic releases Agent Teams now (as rumored a couple of weeks back), after they've already adopted a tiny bit of beads in form of Tasks) means that either they've been building them already back when Steve pitched orchestrators or they've decided that he's been right and it's time to scale the agents. Or they've arrived at the same conclusions independently -- it won't matter in the larger scale of things. I think Steve greately appreciates it existing; if anything, this is a validation of his vision. We'll probably be herding polecats in a couple of months officially.

[mohsen1]

It's not like he was the only one who came up with this idea. I built something like that without knowing about GasTown or Beeds. It's just an obvious next step

https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator

[gbnwl]

I also share your confusion about him somehow managing to dominate credit in this space, when it doesn't even seem like Gastown ended up being very effective as a tool relative to its insane token usage. Everyone who's used an agentic tool for longer than a day will have had the natural desire for them to communicate and coordinate across context windows effectively. I'm guessing he just wrote the punchiest article about it and left an impression on people who had hitherto been ignoring the space entirely.

[MattPalmer1086]

It was a fun article!

[behnamoh]

Exactly! I built something similar. These are such low hanging fruit ideas that no one company/person should be credited for coming up with them.

[yks]

Seriously, I thought that was what langchain was for back in 2023.

[simianwords]

Seriously, what is langchain? It’s so completely useless. Clearly none of the new agents care about it or need it. Irrelevant.

[yks]

Agree, langchain was useless then and completely irrelevant now, but the idea that we need to orchestrate different LLM loops is extremely obvious.

[yieldcrv]

> what is langchain?

and incantation you put on your resume to double your salary for a few months before the company you jumped ship to gets obsoleted by the foundational model

[isoprophlex]

There seems to be a lot of convergent evolution happening in the space. Days before the gas town hype hit, I made a (less baroque, less manic) "agent team" setup: a shell script to kick off a ralph wiggum loop, and CLAUDE-MESSAGE-BUS.md for inter-ralph communication (Thread safety was hacked into this with a .claude.lock file).

The main claude instance is instructed to launch as many ralph loops as it wants, in screen sessions. It is told to sleep for a certain amount of time to periodically keep track of their progress.

It worked reasonably well, but I don't prefer this way of working... yet. Right now I can't write spec (or meta-spec) files quick enough to saturate the agent loops, and I can't QA their output well enough... mostly a me thing, i guess?

[CuriouslyC]

Not a you thing. Fancy orchestration is mostly a waste, validation is the bottleneck. You can do E2E tests and all sorts of analytic guardrails but you need to make sure the functionality matches intent rather than just being "functional" which is still a slow analog process.

[pronik]

> Right now I can't write spec (or meta-spec) files quick enough to saturate the agent loops, and I can't QA their output well enough... mostly a me thing, i guess?

Same for me, however, the velocity of the whole field is astonishing and things change as we get used to them. We are not talking that much about hallucinating anymore, just 4-5 months ago you couldn't trust coding agents with extracting functionality to a separate file without typos, now splitting Git commits works almost without a hinch. The more we get used to agents getting certain things right 100% of the time, the more we'll trust them. There are many many things that I know I won't get right, but I'm absolutely sure my agent will. As soon as we start trusting e.g. a QA agent to do his job, our "project management" velocity will increase too.

Interestingly enough, the infamous "bowling score card" text on how XP works, has demonstrated inherently agentic behaviour in more way than one (they just didn't know what "extreme" was back then). You were supposed to implement a failing test and then implement just enough functionality for this test to not fail anymore, even if the intended functionality was broader -- which is exactly what agents reliably do in a loop. Also, you were supposed to be pair-driving a single machine, which has been incomprehensible to me for almost decades -- after all, every person has their own shortcuts, hardware, IDEs, window managers and what not. Turns out, all you need is a centralized server running a "team manager agent" and multiple developers talking to him to craft software fast (see tmux requirement in Gas Town).

[bonesss]

Compare both approaches to mature actor frameworks and they don’t seem to be breaking much ice. These kinds of supervisor trees and hierarchies aren’t new for actor based systems and they’re obvious applications of LLM agents working in concert.

The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI have been going on this long without such orchestration, considering the unavoidable issues of context windows and unreliable self-validation, without matching the basic system maturity you get from a default Akka installation shows us that these leading LLM providers (with more money, tokens, deals, access, and better employees than any of us), are learning in real time. Big chunks of the next gen hype machine wunder-agents are fully realizable with cron and basic actor based scripting. Deterministically, write once run forever, no subscription needed.

Kubernetes for agents is, speaking as a krappy kubernetes admin, not some leap, it’s how I’ve been wiring my local doom-coding agents together. I have a hypothesis that people at Google (who are pretty ok with kubernetes and maybe some LLM stuff), have been there for a minute too.

Good to see them building this out, excited to see whether LLM cluster failures multiply (like repeating bad photocopies), or nullify (“sorry Dave, but we’re not going to help build another Facebook, we’re not supposed to harm humanity and also PHP, so… no.”).

[ttoinou]

If it was so obvious and easy, why didn't we have this a year ago ? Models were mature enough back then to make this work

[bcrosby95]

The high level idea is obvious but doing it is not easy. "Maybe agents should work in teams like humans with different roles and responsibilities and be optimized for those" isn't exactly mind bending. I experimented with it too when LLM coding became a thing.

As usual, the hard part is the actual doing and producing a usable product.

[CuriouslyC]

Orchestration definitely wasn't possible a year ago, the only tool that even produced decent results that far back was Aider, it wasn't fully agentic, and it didn't really shine until Gemini 2.5 03-25.

The truth is that people are doing experiments on most of this stuff, and a lot of them are even writing about it, but most of the time you don't see that writing (or the projects that get made) unless someone with an audience already (like Steve Yegge) makes it.

[ttoinou]

Roo Code in VSCode was working fine a year ago, even back in November 2024 with Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7

[lossolo]

Because gathering training data and doing post-training takes time. I agree with OP that this is the obvious next step given context length limitations. Humans work the same way in organizations, you have different people specializing in different things because everyone has a limited "context length".

[troupo]

Because they are not good engineers [1]

Also, because they are stuck in a language and an ecosystem that cannot reliably build supervisors, hierarchies of processes etc. You need Erlang/Elixir for that. Or similar implementations like Akka that they mention.

[1] Yes, they claim their AI-written slop in Claude Code is "a tiny game engine" that takes 16ms to output a couple of hundred of characters on screen: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

[ruined]

what mature actor frameworks do you recommend?

[jghn]

They did mention Akka in their post, so I would assume that's one of them.

[troupo]

Elixir/Erlang. It's table stakes for them.

[tyre]

Sorry, are you saying that engineers at Anthropic who work on coding models every day hadn’t thought of multiple of them working together until someone else suggested it?

I remember having conversations about this when the first ChatGPT launched and I don’t work at an AI company.

[astrange]

Claude Code has already had subagent support. Mostly because you have to do very aggressive context window management with Claude or it gets distracted.

[yieldcrv]

Why is Yegge so.... loud?

Like, who cares? Judging from his blog recount of this it doesn't seem like anybody actually does. He's an unnecessarily loud and enthused engineer inserting himself into AI conversations instead of just playing office politics to join the AI automation effort inside of a big corporation?

"wow he was yelling about agent orchestration in March 2025", I was about 5 months behind him, the company I was working for had its now seemingly obligatory "oh fuck, hackathon" back in August 2025

and we all came to the same conclusions. conferences had everyone having the same conclusion, I went to the local AWS Invent, all the panels from AWS employees and Developer Relations guys were about that

it stands to reason that any company working on foundational models and an agentic coding framework would also have talent thinking about that sooner than the rest of us

so why does Yegge want all of this attention and think its important at all, it seems like it would have been a waste of energy to bother with, like in advance everything should have been able to know that. "Anthropic! what are you doing! listen to meeeehhhh let me innnn!"

doesn't make sense, and gastown's branding is further unhinged goofiness

yeah I can't really play the attribution games on this one, can't really get behind who cares. I'm glad its available in a more benign format now

[segmondy]

This is nothing new, folks have been doing this for since 2023. Lots of paper on arxiv and lots of code in github with implementation of multiagents.

... the "limit" were agents were not as smart then, context window was much smaller and RLVR wasn't a thing so agents were trained for just function calling, but not agent calling/coordination.

we have been doing it since then, the difference really is that the models have gotten really smart and good to handle it.

[aaaalone]

Honestly this is one of plenty ideas I also have.

But this shows how much stuff is still to do in the ai space