The code agent orchestra - Addi Osmani
I usually think that Addi is pretty clever, and it’s clear that he really knows his stuff — and it’s cool that all of these tools and methodologies exist, but I can’t help but think that this is not useful at all.
The parent orchestrator only talks to two agents, keeping its context clean. Feature Lead A gets a brief like "Build the search feature" and decomposes it into Data, Logic, and API subagents on its own. The parent never sees those details.
This doesn’t solve any of my problems, which all pertain to expertise, complexity management, and deep knowledge of systems. Whereas a lot of these breathless AI accelerationist thoughtpieces basically assume that everyone is just trying to build the same greenfield project management applications, over and over, all of the time.
"Build a reusable card component." "Integrate with this API." "Build the search feature." What if the search feature was already built, 8 years ago, by someone who has dropped off the face of the earth, and for some reason stopped working earlier this week?
I’d like to think that I’m reasonably bullish about using AI for programming — I’ve had some success with using Claude to increase the pace of development at work — but this just looks like it generates heaps of new code that no one knows how to understand, not even the agents themselves.