Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159789

Points: 4

# Comments: 5

All things being equal, why prefer Docker Compose? From my perspective, a single binary strictly dominates any Docker Compose solution.

Can you explain why my analogy is flawed?

> my critique is at somebody with a printer annoyed they can't get it to print its own instruction manual, so they've drafted one with a pen and are passing it around for feedback.

> Why aren't you using the printer?

You've lost me. Didn't you establish that the printer can't print its own instruction manual? How would I use the printer to print the instruction manual when it can't do that? And can you spell out for me how this relates to my critique of agents?

If this is about my gripe that agents have to search online for their docs, that's my most minor grievance because they can still access their docs. I just think it's a dumb time tradeoff that they don't ship docs alongside their binaries because if the docs were locally available, the agents could search them faster and guarantee the docs matched the binary.

> Feed your blog post to pi - have it implement it - and you will realize pretty quickly that a lot of them are flawed. This would have costs you about the same time as writing this blog post.

I never made the claim that Pi could implement these features trivially. If your claim is that Pi can do this so easily, you should be the one feeding my blog to Pi and showing me the results.

I'm confident that Pi could not implement all the features I described in the time I spent on this blog post (about five hours), so I have no reason to waste five hours trying, but if you're confident I'm wrong, you're welcome to spend your own five hours disproving me.

I'm confused about opencode's v1/v2 split. The docs say v2 is here, but their Github is only v1.x.[0] And the docs don't really explain why v2 is better, but there's a long list of things I have to do to migrate,[1] so I haven't been that eager to pull the trigger, especially since I can't tell if they consider it alpha/beta/release.

[0] https://opencode.ai/v2/docs

[1] https://opencode.ai/v2/docs/migrate-v1/

My take is that agents don't do the expected thing out of the box. I acknowledge that you can extend some agents and customize them, but I'm saying that it's sort of silly that the features I think most people want don't exist as default, out of the box standards.

> If I wrote a blog post complaining that "Programming languages don't let me do memory management", would you not think it's fair to respond with "What are you talking about? Have you heard of C?"

I don't think that's a fair comparison because C does let you do memory management out of the box. I think the better comparison is like, "Go doesn't let you do pattern matching," and the response is like, "Why don't you just patch Go to let you do pattern matching and maintain your own fork of Go?"

But I'm still kind of puzzled by this critique. Isn't it kind of like saying, "Why are you complaining about the agent? The C programming language exists, so you can use that to create any agent you want."

I don't expect the model to be trained on the latest features of the harness, but I think the harness should ship with its own docs so that the model can quickly search local docs rather than search online page by page for docs that don't necessarily match the local harness.

Looks like this is a layer on top of OpenCode. Seems interesting. I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip!

I'm confused how you see this article as a complaint about Pi. I only mention Pi at the very end to say it's one of the agents I've tried. I checked it out, found it too barebones for me and moved on, but I understand why some people prefer it. The existence of Pi isn't a counterargument to, "Why don't agents support development workflows that should be commonplace?"

I didn't want to complain about OpenCode too much because it's open-source and kind of the scrappy underdog to Claude/Codex, but I do find its multitasking support pretty limited. I have to specifically remind it to spin up subagents, and when it does, it'll do 2-3 tasks in parallel and then wait until all of them finish. It can't seem to inspect tasks in progress, and if a subagent dies or hangs, the main agent can't seem to retrieve any information from it, even though I as the human can look at the session and see what happened.

Are you doing anything special to make OpenCode multitask well?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020947

Points: 105

# Comments: 103

But to take Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do" as an example, obviously nobody's Googling, "things to never do," clicking Joel's article, and then getting annoyed at Joel for not telling them immediately. They're finding the post on HN, RSS readers, forums, etc., where they didn't have a specific goal in mind beyond learning/entertainment, so the author has more room to take their time.

I can understand the position that you do care about other people reading your post, but you weigh your own enjoyment of your posts more heavily than anything else, but I'm skeptical of the claim that you don't care who reads your posts.

> I think your anti-patterns apply very well to the stereotypical SWE or HN reader, and if that is who you are targeting, you should absolutely follow these. But the biggest anti-pattern of all is following these anti-patterns while hoping to appeal to the untypical SWE or HN reader.

Can you share more about what you have in mind?

I feel like these recommendations apply outside of software/HN. Like if I had a way to reach knitting bloggers, I'd imagine most of the concepts would be the same with different specifics.

Do you have a software blogger in mind that writes well but doesn't match what I describe in the post?

When bloggers say, "I don't want to write about topic X because person Y already wrote the definitive post about it," I say, "However good the existing article is, there will still be people that prefer yours." Even if the other person is smarter, more knowledgeable, whatever, you're going to explain it in your own way, and that's going to resonate with a distinct set of people than any other article out there.

If you click on a blog post, and the writing is poor or seems LLM-generated, you keep reading? Or do you mean that you're willing to forgive more superficial things like meandering or excessive formality if the post has other redeeming qualities?

As an example, I clicked a post a few weeks ago about orchestrating Claude Code sessions[1], as that's a topic I'm interested in, but I found the writing so poor that I felt like the post was either LLM-generated or written for someone who had different needs than I did. Would you read a post like that to completion if the topic interests you?

[0] https://lobste.rs/s/youq7y/how_write_blog_posts_developers_r...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772806