Jason Robinson

been testing multi-agent setups with tools like cursor and claudecode recently. they were great early on, but giving them more autonomy seems to backfire.

instead of sticking to the main task, they end up hunting down tiny bugs or adding unnecessary code tweaks that just drain hours in loops.

is this just a prompt control issue or are agents hitting a limit with complex context?

One of the things that I have done is instruct my assistant to give me an algorithm, data-structure, distributed-system, or system-design problems that align with my current project.

The goal is to define invariants, choose the structure, reason about complexity and failure cases, rather than have the assistant do all of the thinking.

Some that I recently worked on:

• Counting Bloom Filter design for a specified false-positive rate, deletion, counter saturation, and memory constraints.

• Consistent Hashing with Virtual Nodes distribute agent jobs/provider traffic while minimizing reassignment when workers enter or leave the pool.

• Topological Sort + Cycle Detection for Agent DAGs validate dynamically assembled agent workflows, detect illegal dependency cycles, and produce a valid execution order.

• Weighted Reservoir Sampling select representative evidence/content from a stream under bounded memory when items have different priorities or relevance weights.

• Interval/Dependency Graph for Evidence Invalidation propagate a changed or revoked source through dependent claims, proposals, approvals, and released artifacts without recomputing unaffected branches.

Everyone remembers the first wave of AI panic, jobs disappearing overnight.
It didn't happen that fast, so people relaxed, and now a lot of designers and editors i know genuinely believe AI still can't do what they do.

Tested some of the newer models recently. That confidence feels outdated to me now.

Not trying to fearmonger, just think the real risk right now isn't panic, it's complacency. The first warning didn't come true on schedule, so people stopped checking whether it eventually would.

Curious how others who've actually tested the latest tools feel about this, still confident, or starting to notice the gap closing.