[HN Gopher] Deep Agents
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Deep Agents
Author : saikatsg
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-08-01 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.langchain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.langchain.com)
| seabass wrote:
| Is there more info on how the todo list tool is a noop? How
| exactly does that work?
| JyB wrote:
| Same question. I don't understand what they mean by that. It
| obviously seem pretty central to how Claude Code is so
| effective.
| kjhughes wrote:
| I thought they meant that it's a noop as a tool in the sense
| that it takes no external action. It seems nonetheless
| effective as a means of organizing reasoning and expressing
| status along the way.
| kobstrtr wrote:
| just for chain of thought TodoWrite would be sufficient as
| a tool wouldn't it?
| kobstrtr wrote:
| if it was a noop, I feel like there wouldn't be a need to have
| TodoRead as a tool, since TodoWrite exists. Would love to get
| more info on whether this is really a noop
| aabhay wrote:
| My guess is the todo list is carried across "compress" points
| where the agent summarizes and restarts with fresh context +
| the summary
| ttul wrote:
| The context will contain a record that the tool call took
| place. The todo list is never actually fetched.
| crawshaw wrote:
| If you want to see it in action in some code, our agent Sketch
| uses a TODO list tool:
| https://github.com/boldsoftware/sketch/blob/main/claudetool/...
|
| It is relatively easy to get the agent to use it, most of the
| work for us is surfacing it in the UI.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| My understanding is that it is basically a prompt about making
| a TODO list.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| i think he means it's 'just' a thin concat
|
| most useful prompt stuff seems 'simple' to implement
| ultimately, so it's more impressive to me that such a simple
| idea of TODO goes so far!
|
| (agent frameworks ARE hard in serious settings, don't get me
| wrong, just for other reasons. ex: getting the right mix &
| setup devilishly hard, as are infra layers below like
| multitenacy, multithreading, streaming, cancellation, etc.)
|
| re: the TODO list, strong agree on criticality. it's flipped
| how we do louie.ai for stuff like speed running security log
| analysis competitions. super useful for preventing CoT from
| going off the rails after only a few turns.
|
| a fun 'aha' for me there: nested todo's are great (A.2.i...),
| and easy for the LLM b/c they're linearized anyways
|
| You can see how we replace claude code's for our own internal
| vibe coding usage, which helps with claude's constant
| compactions as a heavy user (= assuages issue of the ticking
| timer for a lobotomy): https://github.com/graphistry/louie-
| py/blob/main/ai/prompts/...
| shmatt wrote:
| At least from what I noticed - Junie from Jetbrains was the first
| to use a very high quality to do list, and it quickly became my
| favorite
|
| I haven't used it since it became paid, but back then Junie was
| slow and thoughtful, while Cursor was constantly re-writing files
| that worked fine, and Claude was somewhere in the middle
| tough wrote:
| Cursor added a UI for todo list and encourages it's agent to
| use it (its great ux, but you can't really see a file of it)
|
| kiro from amazon does both tasks (in tasks.md) and specs.
|
| Too many tools soon, choose what works for you
| manishsharan wrote:
| I have been following along the code in this repo.
| https://github.com/ghuntley/claude-code-source-code-deobfusc...
|
| The author has done a pretty good job of reverse engineering
| Claude Code and explaining the architecture.
|
| update: changed the link to a better repo
| cjonas wrote:
| Can you explain what I'm looking at. Just appears to be a
| massive readme with a bunch of system instructions?
| manishsharan wrote:
| My apologies
|
| This is a better repo to learn about Claude code internals
|
| https://github.com/ghuntley/claude-code-source-code-
| deobfusc...
| jayshah5696 wrote:
| sub agents adding isolating context is the real deal rest is just
| langgraph react agent
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| This is valuable but not really a novel idea.
| manx wrote:
| I'm also in the process of creating a general purpose agent
| cli+library in rust: https://github.com/fdietze/alors
|
| Still work in progress, but I'm already using it to code itself.
| Feedback welcome.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| ah, deep agents = agents with planning + agents as tools => so
| regular agents.
|
| i hate how LangChain has always tried to make things that are
| simple seem very complicated, and all the unnecessary new
| terminology and concepts they've pushed, but whatever sells
| LangSmith.
| web-cowboy wrote:
| As I think through this, I agree with others mentioning that
| "deep agents" still sounds a lot like agents+tools. I guess the
| takeaway for me is:
|
| 1. You need a good LLM for base knowledge.
|
| 2. You need a good system prompt to guide/focus the LLM (create
| an agent).
|
| 3. If you need some functionality that doesn't make any
| decisions, create a tool.
|
| 4. If the agent + tools flows get too wily, break it down into
| smaller domains by spawning sub agents with focused prompts and
| (less?) tools.
| storus wrote:
| "I hacked on an open source package (deepagents) over the
| weekend." Thanks but no thanks.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| most of these agents are still fundamentally simple while
| loops; it shouldn't really take longer than a weekend to get
| one built
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Hacker hacks on project and gets posted to Hacker News.
| Commenter on Hacker News: No thanks, no hacking please.
| storus wrote:
| It's on langchain's official page, a framework that looks
| like it was hacked over the weekend by a fresh grad that
| brought a lot of pain to the agentic development, and this
| just feels like piling up more pain on it.
| epolanski wrote:
| Some of the biggest software in use today was hacked over few
| days in its first versions. Git is a famous one.
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