seems like a rube-goldberg esque way to consume 10x tokens. is this really where the industry is heading?
replyI like to think of it like the difference between dropping a ball on a roulette wheel (get one random number/sequence of repeated) - vs dropping a ball on a carved topographic map, where valleys guide the ball to a particular outcome.
replyIf you can stand a little AI expansion - here are a few points Gemini came up with - I think the idea has some merit:
https://g.co/gemini/share/b5b97867eeb1
(Maybe the better analogy is roulette vs pinball machine)
Why is it Rube Goldbergesque? The process doesn't seem arbitrary.
replyRube Goldberg machines (or Heath Robinson contraptions) aren't arbitrary, they're complicated or contrived ways of achieving the process; often a very literal interpretation of how an automatic machine might imitate an otherwise manual action – a robotic hand movement for example. I think it's quite a good analogy, even if agentic Goldberg works well.
replyThose machines are, to quote Wikipedia, "designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way". This implies there is a much simpler way that works just as well.
replyI don't think the Rube Goldberg analogy works if the agentic meandering is essential complexity required to get at the results. Rube Goldberging it would be something like putting this loop inside some comically overengineered enterprise microservice web which is then found out to be running inside a Window 98 emulator or what have you.
> This implies there is a much simpler way that works just as well
replyYes there is: Write the code yourself
Just to confirm - you did not generate this plan/orchestration/harness - it did all that on its own?
replyCorrect, that's the "workflows" part they introduced in claude code alongside the new model.
replyDid you start with a clean slate or do you have global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and/or specific skills, plugins, etc?
replyI don't have global CLAUDE.md and the only non-default skill I have that was used here is the one to use rodney[0] headless browser. I didn't expressly tell Claude to do browser testing, it decided to do it on its own.
replySo no extra guidance beyond the prompt.
Thanks for sharing this. Going to try it out on a game inspired by Rust. It's helpful re: the point on rodney - I've had a hard time getting the testing to work well in the browser.
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