Claude Code, Claude Flow, and Agent Swarms!

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, I'm driving home and we're going to talk about AI because that's all there is to talk about, right? Um, this is going to be about some of the stuff that I'm trying out at home right now. I don't mean to try and pretend and sound like I'm an expert on this stuff because I have no idea, but I am trying it out and uh seeing what we can do. And I will keep people posted. Uh on my main channel, I'll do more tutorials and stuff trying to demonstrate some of this as I as I'm learning and as I get better at it. But in particular, we're going to be talking about agent swarms. And like I said, I'm not an expert, but I'm going to let you know kind of what I'm trying out, tools I'm using, and uh progress I see so far.

So, that sounds interesting. Let's dive into it. So, the tool that I'm using is something called Claude Flow. So, Claude- Flow. Uh, I am not a Claude user. It's like one of the last LLM tools uh for me to get to and not because I have anything against it, but it's like I'm already so entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem as a .NET developer. So, I have C-pilot in my VS Code in my Visual Studio. I have Cursor. I have a cursor subscription. Um, and uh, like why would I need Claude on top of that? Like it's just one more thing. So, um, Claude Flow um, why Claude Flow? Well, the guy who's put it all together, I think his name is R. I don't know. Ru Ruven. Ruben. Ruben. I should figure that out. I'll have more videos and I will do it justice. I apologize for not knowing his name, but he posts a lot about this stuff on social media.

Um, it almost honestly it feels like there's like a cult following uh from being on the outside of it and I was like, what's going on? like and so started to pay attention and saw that he has like this clawed flow sort of agent swarm tooling and like I've been saying on this channel I'm like hey I'm there's things I'm trying and they're not working and I will keep iterating and keep trying to get better um for my main development. I can't the whole thing can't be an experiment where I get nothing done. Um see if I can let this guy in. Oh, we're going. We're going. Um, so I have to like make time and experiment to make sure that I can iterate on how I'm using AI and agents and things like that.

So historically, I say historically as in it's been like many weeks, not like years, but historically anything agentwise is really like uh co-pilot and pull requests and trying a little bit more with cursor recently and having some better success with cursor. So that's nice. But agents running in swarms like mostly autonomously and just like going at it building stuff like that is not something I have experience yet which is why I'm trying it out. So Claude flow enables this with Claude and um so you can go to the repository, check out the code uh or I believe you can just like npm install claw-flow and you get this thing and then you can set up an API key. So that's what I did.

Uh, and the first time I tried this was a few weeks ago and um I think I set a budget of like $5 because I'm like I don't I I think this thing is going to chew through my wallet and so set a budget for $5 and literally in like sorry people are unable to drive here. One sec. Um, on I'm not exaggerating when I say in like 15 seconds it chewed through the $5 budget. It started and then it was just like nope. Like money's gone. And I remember thinking I guess that's the end of my agent swarm development process because I can't afford that. Like that's crazy. um and just like was like I guess I have to ignore this for now until the technology changes because there's absolutely no way. Now the other night I was interviewing son for a podcast and he uses Claude and does a lot of like uh development with Claude to like with in agent mode and um I don't know if he's using Claude flow.

I didn't ask him specifically, but we were talking about this kind of after the podcast and uh I told him like, "Hey, I'm trying these things out, but like man, like the cost is way prohibitive." And he was saying to me, he's like, "Oh, I have a I guess there's like a Claude Pro and Claude Pro Max kind of thing." So, it's like a $100 a month and $200 a month tiers. So, he was like, "I have that." But then he switched into talking about, oh, have you seen this package that you can install that measures um or basically it looks at the logs and figures out like how much it would cost you in tokens. And he said, "I spend like $10,000 a month." And I was like, "Holy shit." And I was like, "I believe it though because of what I've seen." But

then the part that I didn't understand that he said right after was, "Yeah, which is why it's so awesome to have like the pro subscription." And then I was thinking to myself, well, that sounds dumb. Like you're already you're going to pay for a pro subscription and pay $10,000 a month. Like this feels like a bad move financially. But I didn't realize you pay for the pro subscription, you get limited from the top- end model, but you don't get limited overall. So, you're not paying for usage, you're paying your monthly fee. So, then I went, "Oh crap. If I if I pay a hundred bucks a month, I think he was using the $200 a month tier, but I'm like, if I pay $100 a month, I can pay $100 a month. Like, I can do that. that's something I'm willing to invest in especially for learning this stuff.

I'm going to do it. So then suddenly Cloudflow was back on the table. Um it feels super clunky to get set up and not not even the Clawflow part necessarily. Even the fact that like Claude the the site and Claude code are like you have to like join them because I went to go use it and it was still like nope you don't have like any usage but it hadn't linked my accounts together. I'm like why the hell are there two different accounts for this stuff? Anyway, um that aside, Claude Flow originally when I was trying to install this was a nightmare. an absolute nightmare. I think I actually mentioned this in a video and it took me like eight hours or so of just like literally vibe setting up Claude Flow.

Everything that could go wrong was going wrong and um was getting really pissed off cuz I'm like this is the the stereotypical experience where you're looking at a repository and they're like, "Oh, it's just one click to install and like everything just works." I'm like, I can't even I can't even run your installer. Like, nothing is working. Every single step doesn't work. Then I finally get it installed and then it doesn't run. It's like you're missing stuff and I'm like, how the hell did this not get installed as part of the process? So, when I went to go try this again, I was like, oh yeah, I remember how crappy that experience was. Like, guess I better like buckle up. And um I was getting prepared with a new chat GPT session to say we're going to try it again.

And then uh I go on the repository and I see that he has like a version two and I'm like well if I'm going to get started here I'm going to get on the latest version because why would I not do that? I'm already going to go get all this set up. Let's hop on the latest version and I'm like okay like here we go. And then I'm like, I'm going to run npm install and get this package. And then it worked. It installed it. And I was like, oh, that's weird. Okay. And then I checked the version cuz I'm like surely when I go to check if it like where it's installed in the version, it's going to it's going to mess up and say like npm doesn't even exist now. Worked. So I said, okay, that's super suspicious. Why is this just working?

And then I tried the next step which was like, "Let me go run a swarm." And I'll explain more of this in a moment, but I I uh kick off the swarm. And that's where I was having the licensing issues. Um but that had nothing to do with Claude Flow. That had everything to do with my account not being joined. So take care of that on Claude and then um try again at the console the terminal and I was able to kick off a swarm just like that. So point is either I was really stupid the first time and just completely over complicated it. But uh I think the reality is that at least with the the version two of this stuff as a Windows user in PowerShell run WSL so that I'm using YUbuntu Ubuntu Ubuntu someone's Buntu I'm running Linux and uh so now you have Linux like like all the Linux tooling at your terminal and Um, from there, npm install clawed flow the alpha version.

Hey me, my goodness. And um, and then when your your license is set up for claude, you're good to go. Literally, it was as it was advertised. The first time was certainly not that straightforward for me. So for this stuff, because it's like swarm development, I'm like, I have no idea what I'm going to go ask this stuff to do. So I tried kicking off this other random experiment that I had in my mind. I think I said this in one of the other videos, but basically it's like a a SQL browser. And um what you can do on top of that is that you have LLM integration so that you can get it to optimize queries and like look at your your schemas and stuff like that. Cuz I use uh MySQL Workbench, awesome tool, but I'm like how the hell isn't there AI built into this if everyone and their grandma has built AI into their apps now?

Like there's just a gap here. And I'm like sitting here copying and pasting results into chat GBT from explaining query plans and having it do the analysis for me. I'm like there's a there's something should be able to do this. So I'm like this is a perfect thing to go have a bunch of agents go make. So I kicked that off again and uh and let it run overnight. The unfortunate news is when I went to my computer in the morning, my computer had restarted because uh unfortunately Microsoft decided it was a night that my computer needed updates regardless of what's actually running on my computer. I don't I don't know how this is a thing, man. Like it's like you must update. Like you must not do that while my computer's being used. So, it made a bunch of progress.

Um, and the the part that I'm kind of confused about is like when I go to kick off a swarm when it when it got killed off, I'm like, can I just run it again? Can I run it again from the I'm trying to hold in a yawn, by the way. It's like it's coming. it. Um, can I just run it again or do I have to change my messaging to it? Is it totally corrupt and it's not going to work? I'm like, I I have no idea what's going to happen here. So, uh, I just said running it from the same directory. I said, please finish building out, uh, based on the architecture documentation that's in this folder. Cuz I could see that there was some of it. And then it ran again for a little bit and said it was finished. So I'm like, "Okay, I guess I guess we did it.

We made the SQL tool fully agentic. Didn't have to touch anything." I'm like, "Let's try it out cuz it says it's done." Um, I open up the solution. I press F5 in Visual Studio to run it. Doesn't compile. And I'm sitting here going, "You're me, right?" Because some of the agents that it spins up are ones that write tests. So I'm like, "What the hell's going on here?" Like, it doesn't even compile, but this thing was writing tests. Like, how how did it know the test pass? How did it iterate on the test? So, I'm like, "Okay, let me go check out the test." Somehow the test must have been working. There's no tests. There's two test projects, a unit test project and a normal test project. And there's no tests inside of them. So now I'm sitting here going, "What the hell did this thing build?

It doesn't even compile. There's no tests. And it says it's done." So I don't know the answer. I am not totally blaming this because it got killed off in the middle of the night. I'm not saying, "Hey, this thing sucks." My first attempt was not very fortunate. I think that it had a hard time resuming it, but I haven't nailed this down. But it seems like if I go to run the swarm again, if I tell it like I need you to go make this change, I think it can do it. So before I left for work today, this is one of the unfortunate things. And I think he has a UI that's coming like a web browser or a web page that you can view in the browser. Um, I don't have status on it, so maybe it failed like as soon as I left the house.

But when I get home, I'll check and see. I told it, hey, I, you know, I had told you before to finish this. It doesn't even compile. Actually, this was a step before. Sorry. I was using the command line to to say like you you didn't even compile this. And then it told me it can't find likenet. I was like, "You're kidding me." It went and built all this stuff and like wasn't even able to to try and compile it. Um, but then it it found it. It was like, "Oh, wait. I'm on a Windows machine." And like it figured out the pathing and it was like, "I see it here, but like I'm on Linux. Why do I see it here?" Then it's like, "Wait a second. I think I'm on Windows." And um and then it was able actually to figure out how to run.net.

So part of me is like I need to figure out how to the next time like where do I configure this? Is that just in my claw MD file? Maybe do I have to drop that in for every swarm? I don't know. So, it figured that out. And then when I left the house, I said, "You need to fix the compilation errors by looking at the build output." And you told me that there were tests written, but there's no test. There's just test projects. So, I said, "Go populate those." And maybe when I get home, it'll work. Knowing what I know as of this morning, I'm not very hopeful. And again, not blaming the agent swarm tool. I'm mostly blaming the fact that this blew up overnight from a Windows update. So, we'll see. Um, I did try asking it to build a feature. So, I ran another swarm and you can run multiple in parallel, which is cool.

So, I ran another swarm to go do feature development in another project. But this is while I was discovering that the it like couldn't find.NET. So this feature got built and had the same problem where it's like it it to me it actually looks like it did the right thing. This is a this is a feature that requires domain knowledge that I could go figure out, but I don't know it. From the very little I do know, it did it. So, it literally went to go figure out how this stuff works. Um, but I I think it ran into the same problem where it doesn't know how to go runnet. So, uh I checked the feature out. It doesn't build. But, you know, this is I think this is a solvable problem. I have to figure that out for myself like where I go configure that.

But overall, um, this went from being like the most ridiculous kind of thing where I'm like, you know, I can't even get this thing set up. Then it was like, oh, it's so expensive. There's no way in hell I'm going to use this to this actually might be very feasible. And with that said, I don't know how it will fit into my my workflow. Maybe what I'll do, and I I mean this genuinely, I was thinking about this, but um should I be using it for building my products? Like perhaps if I can find a way to integrate that into my development flow, building out features and stuff like that. I have to play with it to understand. So, but I wonder, could I use it to build the stuff? Like I mentioned, I had a video game that I've been putting together for the last 20 years.

Could I have it go build that for me and I just get to sit in the driver's seat and like tell it to build these really complex systems and I can go look through them? Like I wonder if that will be something that I find like a lot of uh joy in because you know I have changed as a software developer. I don't if I really cared about that stuff to be able to go make that game that I was building. I would find time for it, but I don't. So, I wonder if I enjoy truly I wonder if I enjoy coding that stuff less and I'm more interested in like the design really like thinking about the systems and how they come together. like maybe that's more exciting and I don't want to go write the code one more time for it, but we'll see.

I I'm pretty excited about this stuff. Um I don't know if this is going to turn into just like the same problems I have with agents already, except now there's a swarm of them. That might be the case, right? It's like, hey, we're we're busy, but we're not doing anything that you actually want. So, I'll see. Um, but that's one more thing to incorporate into the flow. So, like I said, I will keep you all posted about how that evolves for me. Wanted to mention it. Maybe someone watching this has dabbled with it. That would be pretty cool to hear about. But I think that's it. That's my AI update for my workflow. And uh friendly reminder, if you want a question answered about software engineering or career development, just leave it below in the comments or you can go to codeccommute.com and uh there is a page there you can submit your question anonymously.

Otherwise, you can reach out to devleader on any social media platform that you want. So, thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one. Take care.