This is pretty cool and feels like we're heading in the right direction, the whole idea of being able to hop between devices while claude code is thinking through problems is neat, but honestly what excites me more is the broader pattern here, like we're moving toward a world where coding isn't really about sitting down and grinding out syntax for hours, it's becoming more about organizing tasks and letting ai agents figure out the implementation details.
I can already see how this evolves into something where you're basically managing a team of specialized agents rather than doing the actual coding, you set up some high-level goals, maybe break them down into chunks, and then different agents pick up different pieces and coordinate with each other, the human becomes more like a project manager making decisions when the agents get stuck or need direction, imho tools like omnara are just the first step toward that, right now it's one agent that needs your input occasionally, but eventually it'll probably be orchestrating multiple agents working in parallel, way better than sitting there watching progress bars for 10 minutes.
Exactly! My ideal vision for the future is that agents will be doing all grunt work/implementation, and we'll just be guiding them.
Can't wait til I'm coding on the beach (by managing a team of agents that notify me when they need me), but it might take a few more model releases before we get there lol
If you think you could do that on the beach, couldn't you do traditional software dev on the beach?
I actually think there's a chance it will shift away from that because it will shift the emphasis to fast feedback loops which means you are spending more of your time interacting with stakeholders, gathering feedback etc. Manual coding is more the sort of task you can do for hours on end without interruption ("at the beach").
How nice when just hung up with a demanding stakeholder who knows you can deliver a lot “instantly” you switch to your phone and your “agents” are just stuck into some weird stuff that they cannot debug.
What happens is the status quo changes. Like what happened with Dev/Ops. If you find yourself with the time to lead agents on a beach retreat you might find yourself pulled into more product design / management meetings instead. AI/Dev like DevOps. Wearing more hats as a result. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I still think that human taste is important even if agents become really good at implementing everything and everyone's just an idea guy. Counter argument: if agents do become really good at implementation, then I'm not sure if even human taste would matter if agents could brute force every possibility and launch it into the market.
Maybe I'll just call it a day and chill with the fam
Seems like your vision is to let AI take over your livelihood. That’s an unusually chipper way to hand over the keys unless you have a lifetime of wealth stashed away.
There is enormous money and effort in making AI that can do that, so if it's possible it is eventually going to happen. The only question is whether you're part of the group making the replacement or the group being replaced.
If their livelihood is solving difficult problems, and writing code is just the implementation detail the gotta deal with, then this isn’t gonna do much to threaten their livelihood. Like, I am not aware of any serious SWE (who actually designs complex systems and implements them) being genuinely worried about their livelihood after trying out AI agents. If anything, that makes them feel more excited about their work.
But if someone’s just purely codemonkeying trivial stuff for their livelihood, then yeah, they should feel threatened. I have a feeling that this isn’t what the grandparent comment user does for a living tho.
I neither know nor care what the C-suite at my company thinks, as long as they provide me the resources necessary to get my job done effectively.
And, so far, it seems like they are fairly understanding, as they are happy about the output of my work. After all, they aren't paying me per-line-of-code delivered, they are paying me to solve problems. If they think that an LLM can replace me fully, they are more than welcome to try it and see how it works out for them.
The entirety of my report chain is just former engineers (with some of them being pivotal to things like GMaps SDK for iOS and such), so I am not really worried about them testing this theory out in practice. And if they do and decide that an LLM can replace me, well, there are always other jobs out there I can take. From my personal experience at this company, I will be just fine.
> it's becoming more about organizing tasks and letting ai agents figure out the implementation details ... different agents pick up different pieces and coordinate with each other
This is exactly what I have been working on for the past year and a half. A system for managing agents where you get to work at a higher abstraction level, explaining (literally with your voice) the concepts & providing feedback. All the agent-agent-human communication is on a shared markdown tree.
I haven't posted it anywhere yet, but your comment just describes the vision too well, I guess it's time to start sharing it :D see https://voicetree.io for a demo video. I have been using it everyday for engineering work, and it really is feeling like how you describe; my job is now more about organizing tasks, explaining them well, and providing critique, but just through talking to the computer. For example, when going through the git diffs of what the agents wrote, I will be speaking out loud any problems I notice, resulting in voice -> text -> markdown tree updates and these will send hook notifications to claude code so they automatically address feedback.
Cool demo!
The first thing that sprung to mind after seeing it, was an image of a busy office floor filled with people talking into their headsets, not selling or buying stocks, but actually programming. If it’s a blessed or cursed image I’ll let you decide.
Haha, blursed one might say. In seriousness though, the social avoidance of wanting to talk to a computer around others will likely be the largest bottleneck to adoption for this sort of tech. May need to initially frame it as for work from home engineers.
Luckily the other side to this project doesn't require any user behavioural changes. The idea is to convert chat histories into a tree format with the same core algorithm, and then send only the relevant sub-tree to the LLM, reducing input tokens and context bloat, thereby also improving accuracy. This would then also unlock almost infinite length LLM chats. I have been running this LLM context retrieval algo against a few benchmarks, GSM-infinite, nolima, and longbench-v2 benchmarks, the early results are very promising, ~60-90% reduced tokens and increased accuracy against SOTA, however only on a subset of the full benchmark datasets.
> moving toward a world where coding isn't really about sitting down and grinding out syntax
Love the idea of "coding" while walking/running outside. For me those outside activities help me clear my mind and think about tough problems or higher level stuff. The thought of directing agents to help persist and refine fleeting thoughts/ideas/insights, flesh out design/code, etc is intriguing
I do a bit of that now, I'll mostly use Claude code at home, and set Jules on some tasks from my phone while exercising. Reviewing code is tedious though, and I don't see it getting too much better.
On the code review part, that's also because we are using languages designed for humans. Once we design the programming languages for the LLM, then you design it in such a way that code review by humans and AI is easy.
Same with project org, if you organize the project for LLM efficiency instead of human efficiency then you simplify some parts that the llm have issues with.
Yeah exactly, this is awesome, I’ve always wondered while waiting for AI operations to complete why I’m “tied” to my machine and can’t just shut my laptop while it worked and see what it’d done later. This is so cool
Yes it would be good if we lived in a world where ai magically knew exactly what we wanted even before we did and implemented everything perfectly first time in a way we’d have no issues with or tweaks we’d like it to make ever. I agree.
I can already see how this evolves into something where you're basically managing a team of specialized agents rather than doing the actual coding, you set up some high-level goals, maybe break them down into chunks, and then different agents pick up different pieces and coordinate with each other, the human becomes more like a project manager making decisions when the agents get stuck or need direction, imho tools like omnara are just the first step toward that, right now it's one agent that needs your input occasionally, but eventually it'll probably be orchestrating multiple agents working in parallel, way better than sitting there watching progress bars for 10 minutes.