Multi-Agent Bot Pipelines Keep Stalling: Direct-to-Harness Still Beats Bot Teams
Old_Grapefruit8774 · reddit · 2026-09-27
A developer shares a full experiment setup—and disappointment—with the hyped multi-agent "bot pipeline" approach to app development.
The setup:
- Hermes on a VM, with Product Owner, designer, dev, and QA bots, a kanban board, and extensive prompt engineering
- DSV4 Flash at max reasoning for all bots, Openviking as the brain, SearXNG for search/research
- Goal: maintain and improve a simple app
The problems:
- Bots constantly request approvals and verification, stalling the workflow
- Or they promise to "do XYZ and get back to you"—and never do
- Overall it feels forced, half-baked despite obvious potential
Verdict: Comparing against his usual harness workflow (Hermes, Opencode, or both combined), he finds direct-to-harness still the more reliable option and suspects Hermes bots may be the wrong tool. The thread debates whether bot pipelines actually work for real app lifecycle management.
More from coding & agent
- Meta Muse praised for transparency: users can inspect all agent tool-call logs — CurieuxExplorer · 2026-09-27
- Microsoft's Foundry Agents, Toolbox and MCP session heads to Global AI Conference Chennai — lee_stott · 2026-09-27
- One prompt, a hike later: Rust PDF compressor matches ILovePDF, built autonomously by Claude — avt_im · 2026-09-27
- Two days of work six months ago, a few hours today: researcher benchmarks agentic coding's leap — avt_im · 2026-09-27
- GitHub Copilot CLI v1.0.89-5 Adds Claude Code Rules File Support — copilot-cli-release-app[bot] · 2026-09-27
- Weeks of Handmade Figma Badges Converted to 3D Assets in 5 Minutes with Opus — NathanWilbanks_ · 2026-09-27