Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tracker1 29 days ago
My only thought is take your time to actually review what the LLM/Agent generates... ensure that you understand and can follow it. Give feedback and iterate as necessary. I've used this analogy a lot, but it's really a lot like managing remote development teams in a lot of ways... and even though you can also use agents for planning, it becomes a critical step as part of the communication loop when you aren't sharing a physical space.

I emphatically do not use multiple agents at a time... I monitor what the agent I'm working with is doing, stop it if it's going down the wrong path and give feedback along the way... don't be afraid to git reset a set of changes, then tell the agent you did so and why. Spend more time on structure and design up front, it will save you a lot of headaches later.

Beyond this, I've found the "5 hour window" that anthropic gives to be pretty helpful... when I've expended my allotment for the window, odds are, I've done enough for the day even. Read, work on something else, etc... know when it's a good time to stop for a day... it's easy to over-work yourself... it takes discipline to actually break for lunch, or the day. For that matter, step away from your desk for lunch and plan to take at least an hour if you can.

You can still deliver a crap ton of value beyond what you individually could do with an agent... but there needs to be a human in the loop for anything that people depend on for their money or livelihood.

1 comments

Charming praise for Anthropic’s low rate limits. It’s a selling point over codex I hadn’t thought of.
Honestly, I've only ever actually hit the 5 hour limit a handful of times and it's been around 30m or less from the next window... I've either stopped for the day or took a break and continued in the next window.

I'm not running a bunch of agents in parallel as I actually review/track most of what is getting done while it's happening.. sometimes I'll stop/rollback and rerun with updated instructions. I can't imagine anyone actually doing meaningful reviews of code generated by a half dozen agents running in parallel for example/contrast.

That said, I mostly stand by my statement... at least in how I've been using AI lately.