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points by fg137 1 day ago | 0 comments

I see people spending so much time creating "workflow" skills that have no benchmark whatsoever to prove they are any more effective than plain one sentence prompts.

[–] tikotus 1 day ago

This takes me back to the era of object oriented programming and UML diagrams. More time was spent framing the solution than implementing it. Is there maybe one more design pattern that could be applied? And when the time to implement came, all those diagrams were mostly in the way. But doing it was fun, since it allowed you to focus on the fun, big picture and skip the nitty gritty details that were actually hard to solve.

I feel like people are going down that slippery slope with harnesses and skills and what not. With the right prompt, and with the right model, and with a sprinkle of magic, the solution will emerge. Oh, it didn't? Let's see if there's a new model available, or if someone has come up with a new clever skill or something. Maybe then... Because actually solving annoying problems is not fun, even less so now that the code is a black box only the LLM can understand.

[–] dutchbart 1 day ago

Diagrams and really, just designing the software you are trying to build is mostly about finding out painpoints before you start the programming (at least at point the time-consuming part). The diagramming allowed you to, without programming, show interactions between modules and check on a high level if you are missing edgecases that can’t be solved because of the design. If you were just using it just to apply design patterns then you were doing it for the wrong purposes.

[–] tikotus 1 day ago

Oh, yeah, it was definitely being done for the wrong purpose. But it was fun, more fun than solving the problems. OOP and the design pattern craze made it feel like progress, when it was actually just about messing around.

[–] dutchbart 21 hours ago

My point was that diagramming does have a purpose. It may save a lot of time and get you closer an mvp rather than without it.

That same premise doesn’t hold with model/harness hopping.

[–] rafaelRiv 1 day ago

I still do diagrams. Not UML specifically, but using mermaid.js. It is a great way to think about the requirements before coding

[–] kkukshtel 1 day ago

This 1000x.

At the same time, the lack of this makes it then very easy for me to tune out harness noise.

[–] lifeisloving 1 day ago

It reminds me of people customizing their nvim configs all day, thinking they're being productive but not getting all that much done.

[–] andy55a 1 day ago

I spent a solid week on mine and haven’t had to tweak it in three years. We’re not all inefficient ;)

[–] banorton 1 day ago

Hey I never deluded myself into thinking I was being productive :)

[–] simianwords 1 day ago

This is so frustrating to me. Ever heard of the planner agent reviewer agent and the tester agent framework?

I'm not sure if that's what you mean but I know many that are making their own flow like this and think that this brings in a higher level of performance..

[–] andyfilms1 1 day ago

I would imagine that performance is coming from essentially dedicating 3x context windows to one task, rather than any particular inter-agent magic.

[–] jst1fthsdys 1 day ago

I mean... isn't that the point of having multiple agents? You can more easily manipulate context to get more consistent results.

[–] kentm 1 day ago

> ... think that this brings in a higher level of performance.

Sure, but how are you measuring this?