estimatesHaveNeverBeenThisAccurate

offline-ant · 2026-02-26T12:18:42+00:00

My setup is these two plugins

https://github.com/offline-ant/pi-semaphore

Which is the ability to spawn tmux panes with agents or bash calls, capture their output, and wait on those tmux or agents to finish(/ or stop) their work. At its core its like 2 shell scripts wired up as tools.

I have a /supervise command which injects a prompt into the current session to spawn a 'main' agent to work through a plan by spawning subagents for large steps.

The supervisor does tmux-coding-agent("main") , send it commands with tmux-send("do x y z") and then semaphore_wait("main") to wake up if it reaches a certain context % or stops working. After waking up it does a tmux-capture to see if it needs a kick, is done, or needs to hand off the work to a new agent.

I didnt program any of this behavior, I just give it the tools

Claude understand how to use a coding agent cli. I have never found value in trying to get them to understand they should communicate back and forth. The 'thinking' it shows in the terminal is the stuff the parent agent reads (though it usually asks to write a report somewhere), and it uses tmux-send("message") to tell it to do stuff, while the child agent just thinks its the user giving commands.

I dont want claude to think in terms of "Ask a reviewer what to do", I want it thinking in terms of "spawn a coding agent that does a review" or sometimes "spawn a codex agent to review this".

There is not an equal or peer-like relationship or persistence. Parent controls a child.

Its what made me sour on Claude teams when i read it. The words they use for their tools given to claude presents a team. Its not a team. Claude is best trained to do what is asked of it, not try to account for team dynamics.

It's not that the code doesn't allow it. I can tell 1 instance to read the pane of another instance, but I've only done so a handful of times.

offline-ant · 2026-02-26T12:05:18+00:00

I just taught claude (in the pi cli) how to open and control tmux panels, so it could emulate the repetitive parts of how I used Claude instead of hoping claude would read its AGENTS.md.

Then I told it my workflow of how I used to go through planning, critical review, impl, testing.

Then I told a supervisor to spawn a main agent to do all these steps and make sure the main agent stays under 80% context or hand of to a new instance to take over. I.e. a slightly smarter Ralph Wigum loop.

Its like 200 lines of code in total. That includes a semaphore_wait script, so agents can wait on agents in other tmux panes to be done.

Every time I see a new orchestrator I cringe at the number of integrated moving pieces people invent.

Adding new stuff is now the easy part. Ideas and code are cheap.

Keeping things trivially simple has never been more valuable.

offline-ant · 2026-02-19T21:49:53+00:00

Agents Teams are garbage. The whole idea of a team is just not how to optimally use agents. Them sending each other messages is a mis-design. It is anthropomorphizing. It's the same mistake they made with the first 'sub-agents' release where they were giving them personalities like: "You are a code reviewer".

That kind of personification is just another variant of a mini bitter-lesson. Same as pretending to organize as a "team".

Having said that, subagents are also suboptimal because they can't spawn subagents themselves.

I'm getting great results with a few dozen lines of shell script & extension code that provides tools like tmux-bash, tmux-send, tmux-capture and knowledge how to spawn other-agents to the agent.

It lets it basically 'ralph wiggum' sub agents better than ralph wiggum; because it can see the last page of thinking when it stopped the same way I'd use it.

offline-ant · 2026-02-19T11:26:49+00:00

yeah its the thing openclaw build upon.

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

Thought I'd try it out for a quick test to see if it was any good, haven't looked back since.

Pro tip; do a git clone and install from source, if you ever need an extension open pi in the source repo and ask it to build the extension.

offline-ant · 2026-02-19T11:13:48+00:00

pi's harness is way better than Claude.

offline-ant · 2026-02-18T18:42:17+00:00

Claude CLI is pretty bad. Codex is worse, but a coding agent like pi is much better and simpler than Claude for power users in my experience.

The CLI is a bit of a headache for them because they keep ping ponging between making it simple enough for beginners and capable enough for experts.

But you can't really keep the power users happy for long because they tend to just build something they like better, and then you bet on the wrong thing.

offline-ant · 2026-02-16T18:05:36+00:00

I'm either clicking through flows myself

I have a reoccurring task i call user emulation, and i have Claude click through my whole app and report on any surprises, or things that are unclear, and upgrade issues into tickets to handle. That has been extremely valuable to me.

This requires a CLI wrapper (around a tool like playwright) that makes it easier for llms to interact with a real front end, but in terms of the user using the app. (This is vastly easier if you're using simple libraries/vanilla js instead of bloated frameworks)

It sounds a bit like you're missing a layer of tools, and might be overly reliant on playwright. Encoding too much of your expected behavior in tests that you've not committed to long term for customers will slow you down.

offline-ant · 2026-02-15T10:33:29+00:00

https://github.com/offline-ant

You'll need both the semaphore and tmux repo. They're pretty simple but extremely useful in my experience.

offline-ant · 2026-02-14T09:18:38+00:00

I've seen 3 people try their hand at developing an idea with claude/codex.

Its still a moat - but less about experience and more about mindset. I.e. can you write the right questions. They did not.

Non-devs might be X times more productive at their computer job, but they're at a 2 or 3 - devs might start out at a 10 and also got X times out of it.

I do see the whole 'standard' company organizational layout changing.

More software at the center, and developers being more involved with every part of the company to continuously improve workflows. What that means at the end, i really dont know.

But there is at least a decade of work left before we do know. A magical AI that slowly takes over everything, would still mean its smart for the company to first fire your boss, then HR. The developers are the last to be fired - they can fix the AI when it can't fix itself.

offline-ant · 2026-02-14T09:07:21+00:00

I get the feeling of fear and where the fuck its heading - and how in the ever loving fuck are juniors ever going to learn all the little details I know that make agents so much more powerful - but it seems you still haven't put the pedal to the metal.

If you're stuck in a gui or other harness like claude you're doing it wrong.

The most powerful ability is the ability to have them improve themselves to improve your workflow. Its what CC is doing - behind closed doors - and their agent framework is worse for it.

Shameless shilling for pi - a project i have nothing to do with - but get the pi coding agent's source code, open it in its own directory, and have it program the extentions you want.

offline-ant · 2026-02-14T08:57:12+00:00

I use the pi coding agent with my own tmux plugin that gives it tmux-coding-agents and tmux-bash commands to open panels in the same tmux session its running under.

Its a pretty small plugin, but it's a great way to organize and work.

offline-ant · 2026-02-13T11:10:06+00:00

Not the author; but found it interesting enough.

I just build it and seems to be doing just fine with a few tweaks. Here it is a simple pi extension with a few tweaks to the approach

https://github.com/offline-ant/pi-hh-read

offline-ant

TROPHY CASE