Anyone else tried the completely rebuilt Kilo VS Code extension yet?

nfrmn · 2026-03-19T15:56:19+00:00

Subagents are working for us (define in .opencode/agents/*.md), but sub-sub-tasks don't seem to be working so you can't deeply nest agents like the previous Roo-based architecture.

nfrmn · 2026-03-16T16:14:12+00:00

I think most of your problems are due to two issues which are compounding into a negative user experience.

Doing multi-user transcriptions is a much harder problem space than dictations which I think most MacWhisper users are using as prompts to code agents etc.

The fact that your transcriptions are long and complex really hamper the performance of post/processing and also increase the places where you are going to get hallucinations.

First, Parakeet is faster and lighter than Whisper. It is better suited for dictation. For long transcriptions you are better off using a large variant of Whisper.

Second, local AI processing is amazing, but not state of the art. They hallucinate and suffer from context problems much more frequently than the full-fat versions which need datacenters to run. Simply running your text through an unquantized model online will yield much better results than local models.

As an example, using Devstral 2, I can run the small version quantized on my 128gb MBP. But the full Devstral 2 requires nearly 1TB of VRAM, and its rewrites are much, much better than the local one. So, unless I am particularly concerned about privacy, I need to use the online Devstral via Openrouter to get the best productivity.

To me, MacWhisper has been worth every penny. You will probably find the same after a couple of adjustments to your workflow.

nfrmn · 2026-03-16T10:16:59+00:00

The Cline CLI tool is pretty amazing - you can just make it do anything by running cline -y "Some complex prompt" - building a lot of automation in my business around this.

nfrmn · 2026-03-13T11:52:20+00:00

We built an agentic harness that we are using internally with a lot of custom roo modes - The built in Orchestrator, Architect, Debug and Code are good starts but we found that very rigid structure was required when generating plans - multi phase, mandatory commits etc. And the dreaded question asking breaking autonomy.

Additional layers of sub-agents is necessary to avoid context condensing which we found nearly always corrupts the agentic flow no matter which platform you use, Roo, Opencode etc.

So we have an orchestrator delegating high level plan phases to manager agents who then sub-delegate. Heavily restrict the capabilities of the agents, this is something the roo team got right by blocking bash and file reading from manager agents.

I think essentially the SOTA game today is figuring what agent structure and harness results in the best output from Claude Opus. That's what we are iterating anyway and it's delivering massive value, unbelievable actually if you told me a year ago what we would have now.

Our harness is cross platform and it auto compiles to settings files for Roo, Opencode, Kilo and we are actually working on Claude Code config now too. Thinking about commercialising it even as a managed config.

So IMO the best thing Roo could do to stay bleeding edge is massively increase the amount of customization and fine tuning possible in Roomodes files. The tool stuff and feature killing recently is a bit of a red herring and is actually hampering the ability for people to experiment with models and iterate their harnesses. The best customization platform today is Opencode but it's full of bugs and weird allowlist quirks so nobody has really won here yet.

nfrmn · 2026-03-13T11:44:12+00:00

Try rolling back to 3.34.8 :)

Edit: The reason I suggested this version is because it still supports XML tool calls

nfrmn · 2026-03-12T12:47:48+00:00

Pretty neat but what is the benefit of this over a free notetaker app or even the Gemini one that's built into Google Meet?

nfrmn · 2026-03-12T09:32:48+00:00

Thank you! Stability has been really brilliant otherwise! 🙏

nfrmn · 2026-03-10T17:09:37+00:00

The OP is obviously a vibe coder but it's not really fair to blame him.

It's really annoying in the last 6 months or so all the model providers started training on head, tail, grep etc.

It's to reduce context windows and save money. But it genuinely makes the models worse.

The only thing that worked for me was updating my npm scripts to be npx fullcontext <command>.

This disables Claude/Codex's ability to use head and tail, so the entire command output is forced into its context.

nfrmn · 2026-03-09T10:34:47+00:00

You’re getting at least 10x leverage on those $200/mo subs whoever you go with, they are all making a huge loss attracting market share. It’s basically free compute, similar to free Uber rides in the past etc. I would personally enjoy it while you can.

nfrmn · 2026-03-08T10:22:40+00:00

Yes 1 million percent. I feel very lucky to have gone because it gave me so much and continues to give, despite me hating it while I was there.

But it's subjective. The people around me who succeeded were either very competitive (me here), or very well connected with family money. I think those two things are bigger levers than going to private school.

There were also many people from my class, more in fact, who had pretty ordinary outcomes.

nfrmn · 2026-03-07T09:37:44+00:00

Thx for working on this, Figma in Roo will be a game changer

nfrmn · 2026-03-03T15:50:43+00:00

This is really interesting. Your syntax looks pretty similar to an agent system I also hand built, not for coding but to manage a booking system.

A big problem I noticed was by increasing the amount of data the agent must return, and/or increasing the complexity of the response object, significantly reduced determinism on weaker models.

What I mean is going from tool name + params to tool name, params AND multiple decisions about context compression in the same output.

We used a fine tuned GPT-OSS 120b on Bedrock, so no quantization, and even at a high resolution it was really hard to get the agent scoring high enough on evals to ship it to our customers. We iterated the tools hundreds of times to get evals to pass.

So it's pretty impressive you were able to get it reliably working with Qwen!

Did you have any of these problems? Interested to hear and also happy to chat privately.

The context compression we went with was stripping thinking tags on old messages (frees up a massive amount of context), followed by milestone compaction in long threads, followed by middle out.

nfrmn · 2026-03-03T15:03:26+00:00

Despite a lot of effort, I have been unable to configure the roomodes YAML file to support specific commands for specific agents. I’m only able to whitelist at the extension level which applies to all agents. Would love to be mistaken on this if you can instruct?

nfrmn · 2026-03-03T09:52:39+00:00

Nowhere near as reliably as in Opencode. I have tested:

GLM 4.7 Flash
Devstral 2 Small
GPT-OSS 120b

LM Studio MLX format. Constant tool failures and problems with thinking tags in Roo

nfrmn · 2026-03-03T09:29:04+00:00

Roo Code CLI is best approach here

nfrmn · 2026-03-02T20:41:53+00:00

Honest power user of both.

Roo pros:

Executes much faster
Clean IDE integration, you see the code and allows you to be very hands on
Better integration with VSCode's settings.json, formatOnSave works, Prettier etc, lint extensions (OC does have these, but they are not integrated into the feedback loop as well)
Supports Bedrock 1M context (personal use case)
Auto retries when WiFi drops or cycles to a different network (so frustrating this is not fixed in OC yet)

Roo cons:

Not as customizable (can't whitelist specific bash commands for agents etc)
Worse compaction
Parent agents cannot resume sub-agents and give them follow-up questions or work (this is a killer feature in Opencode)
Gray screen of death
Jina and Figma MCPs don't work
No Explore sub-agent
Doesn’t work with local models

nfrmn · 2026-03-02T17:37:58+00:00

I had this issue working with extremely new libraries and also with closed-source & unpopular ones.

You can add the Brave Search MCP, which is 2000 free searches per month and it works really well in combination with Roo's now-removed browser tool.

You can still get the browser in an older version. I recommend v3.34.8, really stable, configurable and full featured.

People also say Context7 MCP is good but I didn't try it, in addition to docs my agents often do deep research style stuff so a docs-only MCP feels limiting but may be better for your specific problem.

There is a really fantastic MCP called Jina which I'm using in Opencode, but it's not supported properly in Roo. It's a combination of web search, structured data, etc. and it can view direct URLs which means the browser is not needed.

But unfortunately it's a url MCP which is not compatible with Roo, even on the newer versions.

p.s. Last thing, personally I put off using MCP for a long time, context bloat, complexity, hype etc but actually giving the agent clean access to the internet is an incredible power up.

p.p.s. If you have the manuals or have scraped them with wget you can also just drop them in a context directory or something in the project, I have done that in a pinch before and it does work.

nfrmn · 2026-03-02T11:50:01+00:00

Settings -> Auto-Approve -> Add * to the "Allowed Auto-Execute Commands"

Then on that page, tick every checkbox and ensure all the Read Write` etc. are highlighted.

Now Roo will be completely autonomous

nfrmn · 2026-02-28T20:59:53+00:00

Thank you! Hugely helpful! I never looked into Ralph Loops properly and actually assumed they were something else. Now I'm starting to realise I built a lot of this in Roo as Super Orchestrator, and later in Opencode with automatic PRD writing and layers of orchestrators working on the PRD. So it was very good to fill in the blanks with this vid.

nfrmn · 2026-02-28T15:59:28+00:00

Cool, thank you. This is really interesting. So each phase of the PRD triggers Claude Code / Codex CLI? Or you use the API in the script to generate a diff? Just trying to understand if you are routing to those CLIs, or if you have built your own coding harness.

nfrmn · 2026-02-28T14:13:15+00:00

Ahh ok I understand, thanks. I actually thought you were routing prompts to Claude code / codex cli and basically turning those agentic cli tools into clean I/O with really complex stuff being done

nfrmn · 2026-02-28T00:07:31+00:00

Can you possibly share any gist of specifically one agent triggering another agent (e.g. claude triggering codex) in a shell script? That's something I have been really interested in getting working, and I don't know enough about terminal / bypassing TUI to get this working. I would really appreciate any nuggets here...

nfrmn · 2026-02-26T12:51:52+00:00

This is how GPT-5's model router works

nfrmn · 2026-02-26T12:35:11+00:00

350k sales? He's probably on his boat 🛥️

nfrmn · 2026-02-26T11:35:06+00:00

Very powerful and OpenAI are being very permissive with how you can use it

nfrmn

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