[bluerooibos]

This is great and all but, who can actually afford to let these agents run on tasks all day long? Is anyone here actually using this or are these rollouts aimed at large companies?

I'm burning through so many tokens on Cursor that I've had to upgrade to Ultra recently - and i'm convinced they're tweaking the burn rate behind the scenes - usage allowance doesn't seem proportional.

Thank god the open source/local LLM world isn't far behind.

[anupamchugh]

Real numbers from today. FastAPI codebase, ~50k LOC. 4 agents, 6 tasks, ~6 min wall clock vs ~18-20 min sequential. 24 tests, 0 file conflicts. Token cost: roughly 4x a single session.

To your cost question — agent teams are sprinters, not marathon runners. You use them for a 6-minute burst of parallel work, not all day. A 6-minute burst at 4x cost is still cheaper than 20 minutes at 1x if your time matters more than tokens.

The constraint nobody mentions: tasks must be file-disjoint. Two agents editing the same file means overwrites. Plan decomposition matters more than the agents themselves.

One thing to watch: Claude Code crashed mid-session with a React reconciler error (#23555). 4 agents + MCP servers pushes the UI past its limits.

[simianwords]

Need it be actually disjoint? Interested in learning about the limitation here because apparently the agents can coordinate.

Otherwise what’s the difference between what they are providing vs me creating two independent pull requests using agents and having an agent resolve merge conflicts?

[MarkMarine]

A Claude max 20x plan and you’ll be fine. I’d been doing my normal process of running 4 Claude sessions in parallel because that was about the right amount of concurrent sessions for me to watch what’s going on and approve/deny plans and code… and this blows it out of the water. With an agent swarm it’s so fast at executing and testing I’m limited by my idea and review capabilities now. I tried running 2 and I can’t keep up, I’m defining specs and the other window is done, tested, validated and waiting for me.

[rahimnathwani]

Many many companies can afford to hire a junior engineer for $150k/year (plus employer payroll taxes, employee benefits etc.).

Are you spending more than $150k per year on AI?

(Also, you're talking about the cost of your Cursor subscription, when the article is about Claude Code. Maybe try Claude Max instead?)

[freeone3000]

If it could do anything that a junior dev could, that’d be a valid point of comparison. But it continually, wildly performs slower and falls short every time I’ve tried.

[logicx24]

I can't even get through my Claude Max quota, and that's only 200/mo. And I code every day and use it for various other pretty-intensive tasks.

[dangus]

only $200/mo…$200 a month is a used car payment.

I guarantee you that price will double by 2027. Then it’ll be a new car payment!

I’m really not saying this to be snarky, I’m saying this to point out that we’re really already in the enshittification phase before the rapid growth phase has even ended. You’re paying $200 and acting like that’s a cheap SaaS product for an individual.

I pay less for Autocad products!

This whole product release is about maximizing your bill, not maximizing your productivity.

I don’t need agents to talk to each other. I need one agent to do the job right.

[emp17344]

Especially for what’s basically an experiment. Gas town didn’t really work, so there’s no guarantee this will even produce anything of value.

[reactordev]

You know those VC funded startups with just two founders… them.

[jwpapi]

I mean what you get for Claude Code Max is insane its 30x on the token price. If you don’t spend that all it’s your own fault. That must be below elecricity cost