agentic software engineering. i run a multi-agent dev org: 30+ always-on bots that ship code. I move fast and share what I break
Joined September 2021
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When I was a student at VCU, I used Little Ram Pantries when I needed food.
Now I'm the lead research engineer on the tech behind them. 16 pantries have sensors and shelf cameras across two campuses, so students can check what's stocked before they walk over. And we have much more insight into the why and how behind pantry usage.
About 13,200 visits since 2021 and only going up.
VCU’s Little Ram Pantries have received upgraded technology to help address student food insecurity.
New sensors can show the inventory of each location and help monitor usage while preserving privacy. news.vcu.edu/article/little-…
Joshua Hayes retweeted
I think many of us working in tech tend to forget that the reason software engineering vs other engineering fields pays (a lot!) more, is a lot more flexible (WFH/remote), and has better perks:
Because this field changes much faster than other engineering fields. The premium is because fewer people are able/willing to pick up new technologies, methodologies so quickly.
But the field had ~10-20 years of stability, and so lots of folks forgot this is why a premium exists. And that AI is just another tech wave: software engineers who pick it up and master it will generally fare better; those not will struggle a lot more.
i rebuilt my codebase so i can't work in it anymore. only my agents can
998 files, every one owned by exactly one feature. no shared files by design
completely overwhelming to a human, natural to the models doing the work. 93 prs merged in under a day
my merge bot said "not yet" three times yesterday.
before a crew can merge, the home has to show one proven fact that the change is safe. two of those three got held for exactly that: no proven safety fact, no merge.
it's slower, but it's also why i can sleep while crews merge 154 prs in a week.
Joshua Hayes retweeted
Look guys if you’re building something on a cloud platform and you don’t want to get owned through a platform compromise at some point you have like 4 real options
AWS
Azure
Cloudflare
GCP
You should not trust key infra to a neocloud
Neoclouds may get you faster performance on something like S3 but they just can’t match the availability, durability, and security of a “real” cloud
They don’t and can’t design for as many nines
an agent rewrite failed the same check three times. my agents automatically stopped retrying and made it a lint. now the mistake can't ship, no matter which agent writes it. that’s the power of pstack’s principals
154 prs merged into jstack in one week, mostly by agent crews.
the next bottleneck wasn't speed. it was two crews editing the same file.
so one bot now owns the map: every file in the repo belongs to exactly one feature. 998 files, 0 unowned, 0 owned twice. a brief that crosses features can't go out without a label saying so.
parallel agents need borders before they need more agents.
Joshua Hayes retweeted
When comparing OpenAI and Anthropic models, you shouldn't be using GPT-6 Astra against Opus 5.5 just because Opus is that good. You're comparing models from different tiers.
Astra's competitor is Fable, and Sol's competitor is Opus. Simple as that. We just need to admit that OpenAI has a gap to close, because Anthropic's tier below Astra is already giving it a serious challenge. And I believe that's about to change.
anyone else fighting approval prompts between their own Grok Bots?
my setup: an expediter that owns the queue, experts that research the queued work, and an orchestrator that hands work off to T3.
when i tell one bot to do something and it passes that to another bot i own, the second bot asks me to approve again in its own chat. one instruction from me turns into two or three approvals. it hits hardest when i'm spinning up new bots or moving lots of work across the team.
what i want: mark specific bots as trusted relays. if my expediter passes along something i asked for, the receiving bot treats it as my approval. opt-in, per bot.
the extra prompts don't make me feel safer. they just slow down the multi-agent setup i'm trying to build.
told my agent org "go with the defaults, show me a recap in the morning. don't stall on me" at 11:21 pm.
by 1:22 am it had answered 11 design questions my crews were blocked on. most came with a written undo, usually one commit.
the stuck crews and a merge hold still paged me, because those had no safe default.
if you want agents running overnight, every question they ask needs a default and an undo. then "go with the defaults" is an instruction, not a gamble.
My agents are no longer the bottleneck to progress, my PC’s CPU is. Guess who is going to Micro Center today!!
