‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Plan mode is dead

591 points · 510 comments · jmvldz

  1. SillyUsername · · focus · HN ↗
    I'm going through the same problem right now

    Qwen 3.8 27b is the supervisor

    Qwen 3.5 4b are the 6-15 minions it controls

    Gemma 4 e4b is the validator for the supervisor.

    A plan means it preps all work for the agents up front, tests that evals work, makes sure the dev environment is right for each agent, then finds and fixes each before the distributed tasks even begin.

    What I thought would take minutes took hours as a supervisor or one agent did the prep / pre flight work.

    My solution so far has been to drop all but basic setup and force the supervisor to ask before every op - if this is not the design choices, can this be run in parallel? If so, hand it off NOW.

    I'm still iterating this workflow, but less setup for all the minions plus handing them work that may be incomplete/ broken is caught and fixed by the minion and its own qa gates.

    This can mean a number of minions end up replicating the same fixes, but in general the time cost of that is small Vs the supervisor working in parallel instead of too sequentially.

    1. MuffinFlavored · · focus · HN ↗

          > Qwen 3.8 27b is the supervisor
          > 
          > Qwen 3.5 4b are the 6-15 minions it controls
          > 
          > Gemma 4 e4b is the validator for the supervisor.
      
      
      I just use Opus 5.5 and don't think about it?
      1. UncleOxidant · · focus · HN ↗
        Or just use a more capable local model like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?
        1. solarkraft · · focus · HN ↗
          Or Kimi K3? /s

          Some people are resource constrained.

      2. SillyUsername · · focus · HN ↗
        These are self hosted for learning experience, I could have built an agent swarm in the cloud, but I'd never have learnt the fundamentals.

        - Cold starts impact, context length issues, task lifecycle management

        - Inefficiencies in delegation, necessitating workflow patterns for small projects (big AIs hide this problem until you scale and they hit the same issues).

        - Limits of the AI would be harder to find or notice (e.g. where time - and cost - is being spent needlessly).

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.