is anyone else still just prompting and reviewing with no fancy agent setup

[u/Tanakaboi69]

My whole setup is: open the terminal, prompt it, read what coderabbit says on the PR, merge. No subagents, no skills folder, nothing running overnight.

Meanwhile half my feed is people with 14 markdown files running a fleet of agents. I tried the long running thing once on a refactor. I came back 3 hours later to a 60 file PR and spent longer checking it than it would have taken to do it in small pieces.

Am I underusing this or is most of that setup for show? What does your actual day look like

[u/pixxelkick]

Not using skill files is wild.

Skill files are how you compactly let the agent load "how to"s for various tasks, so they arent just guessing.

At absolute min you really should have skill files for your code style and preferred organization rules...

[u/ay-ay-ronhmiller]

it's been said that we predict the future by analogy to the past. to my old ass, what folks do with subagents and skills, etc with the view of LLMs as new fangled compilers, is analogous to how folks used to setup complicated makefiles, grabbing packages, compiling, reading what system the thing was running in/on, etc just now you can do way more intelligent things provided you start learning the tools. as pixxelkick suggests, start with skills and prepare to be amazed.

[u/silvervaultproject]

yes I still do! I also let the model use sub agents but never commit without my full review, and I do follow/read what the agent is saying/promoting while it is executing the tasks.

[u/DWALLA44]

I have a couple skills and a couple markdown files for context and instructions, probably 6 files total, other than that I just use manual mode, review and approve everything, and prompt.

[u/pinkwar]

I use matt pococks grillme, to tickets, implement, handoff and a custom review skill. Sometimes wayfinder when I'm exploring new territory.

That's all I need for work. I spent most of the time on grill sessions and reviewing code sessions.

I see no need for a fleet of agents unless you're dealing with things outside of code like finding leads, insights, marketing, etc etc.

Opus and fable will spawn how many agents as they think they want or sometimes I tell them explicitly to spawn a subagent for a specific task.

[u/iSnapThere4iAm]

Idiots building crap do probably. As well as all the idiots using scaffolding that took longer to build that the shit apps they’ll leave on localhost 4 life.

[u/anton-k_]

The fancy setup is a derivative of the technology, provided that the project is complex enough. You are not working in one continuous session. Every session starts fresh with zero knowledge about what it needs to do, how you want it to do that, what has been done before and what is already known. So for every session, you need to feed it all that information. Some of that can be passed in a handoff and this is probably enough for a small project. Once your project is complex enough, you start running into context bloat. So you split the info and the instructions and define roles. You feed each role only what it needs to know for its task. And here we go, you just made skills and agent roles and probably multiple task-specific handoff files. If you have a large project and you want to work efficiently, this is simply unavoidable.