[linsomniac]

>I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents"

I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above. An agent swarm, in my understanding and checked via a google search, does not imply working on multiple features at one time.

It is working on one feature with multiple agents taking different roles on that task. Like maybe a python expert, a code simplifier, a UI/UX expert, a QA tester, and a devils advocate working together to implement a feature.

[vips7L]

They’re not experts.

[signatoremo]

Sensitive but uninformed. Expert is a common AI concept, going back for decades. It wasn’t invented with LLM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

[vips7L]

That’s totally what they were talking about.

[grey-area]

What do you mean, my prompts specifically ask for a phd level expert in every field?

\s

[vidimitrov]

"Expertise" is a completely different beast from "knowledge".

Expecting to gain it from a model only through prompting is similar to expecting to become capable of something only because you bought a book on the topic.

[grey-area]

This was sarcasm, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

[noodletheworld]

> does not imply working on multiple features at one time.

How can multiple parallel agents some local and some in the cloud be working on a single task?

How can:

> All local and cloud agents appear in the sidebar, including the ones you kick off from mobile, web, desktop, Slack, GitHub, and Linear. (From the announcement, under “Run many agents in parallel”)

…be working on the same task?

Subagents are different, but the OP is not confused about what cursor is pushing, and it is not what you describe.

[victorbjorklund]

Same way a developer and designer can work on the same feature during the same week? Or two developers working on the same feature during the same week. They can have a common api contract and then one builds the frontend and the other works on the backend.

[cruffle_duffle]

Subagents are isolated context windows, which means they cannot get polluted as easily with garbage from the main thread. You can have multiple of them running in parallel doing their own separate things in service of whatever your own “brain thread”… it’s handy because one might be exploring some aspect of what you are working on while another is looking at it from a different perspective.

I think the people doing multiple brain threads at once are doing that because the damn tools are so fucking slow. Give it little while and I’m sure these things will take significantly less time to generate tokens. So much so that brand new bottlenecks will open up…

[linsomniac]

They are confused in the word they use: the article on what Cursor is pushing does not, according to ^F, mention "swarm" at all. Since we have a word for multiple agents working on one task, it is probably best not to use that word if you are referring to multiple agents working on multiple tasks, right?

I bring it up not to be pedantic, but because if you think it implies multi-tasking and dismiss it, you are missing out on it's ability to help in single-tasking.

[jiggunjer]

I think cursor doesn't make distinction between single or multiple logical tasks for swarm-like workloads. Subagents is the word they use for the swarm workers.

Fwiw when I select multiple models for a prompt it just feeds the same prompt to them in parallel (isolated worktrees), this isn't the same as the swarm pattern in 2.4+ (default no worktrees).

[noodletheworld]

> I bring it up not to be pedantic

The OP is fundamentally expressing the opinion that single task threads are easier to keep track of.

Agree / disagree? Sure.

…but dipping into pedantry about terms (swarm, subagent, vine coding, agentic engineering) really doesn't add anything to the conversation does it?

You said:

> I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above.

…but from reading the entire post I am pretty skeptical anyone was confused as to what they meant.

Wrong term? Don't care. If someone calls it a hallucination? Also don't care.

That cursor is focusing on “do stuff in parallel guys!”? Yeah, I care about that.

> it is probably best not to use that word if you are referring to multiple agents working on multiple tasks, right?

Not relevant to the thread. Also, I work with people who casually swap between using these exact words to mean both things.

I donnnt caarrrrre what people call it.

…when the meaning is obvious from the context, it doesnt matter.