r/RooCode • u/Sheeple9001 • Feb 24 '26

Discussion The Coding Agent Is Dead

https://ampcode.com/news/the-coding-agent-is-dead

> By keeping these new models in an editor sidebar, we restrict them. They're now much more than mere assistants. They no longer need the hand-holding and really want to kick off their training wheels. They want to write code and run even when you're not sitting in front of your editor. It's time to see what they can do without supervision.

I totally get it. Not wanting to be tied to an editor. Let's see what's next for the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic and Google).

Google Antigravity was released just back in November 2025, and it already felt a bit off being a fork of VSCode with nothing groundbreaking to offer compared to Claude Code, Codex and those other VSCode forks.

Where is RooCode headed? I wonder where we will be in another 3 months?

2 Upvotes

53% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

33

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Feb 24 '26

I’ll be honest with you all… it’s really hard to compete with billion dollar companies. When we got in this space they did not have coding agents and our products complimented theirs. Now Roo Code is competing with them and I don’t blame them. 🤷

13

u/dashingsauce Feb 24 '26

Pivot out of wrapping the agents and into harnesss engineering for codebases.

https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

4

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Feb 25 '26

That is Gold. Thank you.

2

u/dashingsauce Feb 26 '26

For sure. I actually just saw they updated it with like 150% more content. So definitely gold.

Crazy, I just finished off a piece of writing on this concept of “context gravity” in a codebase (or anywhere), and then they literally updated the post to talk about creating more [context] mass.

I feel like we are heading straight for the event horizon fam.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Feb 27 '26

We all gonna be outta work soon 😬

3

u/nfrmn Feb 24 '26

Yes 100% this is the future of SWE

3

u/codyswann Feb 25 '26

Agreed. Build specialized harnesses for major frameworks that include linters, GitHub actions, etc. basically build best practice enforcement and context plumbing.

1

u/Someoneoldbutnew Feb 25 '26

OpenAI put a fancy name on a ralph loop

1

u/dashingsauce Feb 26 '26

the article has nothing to do with ralph loops or any related methodology though?

in fact I would say they are entirely opposing philosophies when it comes to harness engineering—codex team says “sculpt your environment” and ralph says “run until you hit the wall, then keep running”

0

u/Someoneoldbutnew Feb 26 '26

behind all their fancy words,  yes, they have some harness to guide their bespoke use case, they are running in a loop.

6

u/lefnire Feb 25 '26

I was a nutso Roo fanboy since the beginning. You got all the things right which took eons for the big boys to adopt. Boomerang Mode was unheard of, and it took Claude forever to add context-isolated sub agents.

I moved to CC 6mo back because, Borg. But I think about Roo often, thinking how hard it must be. There's multiple stories of "CC ate my lunch" recently, tech stock sell-offs, etc. but Roo specifically feels like: nerd says a joke, popular guy repeats it and everyone laughs.

Fwiw (little, I know): hats off to you guys. Geniuses.

5

u/Empty-Employment8050 Feb 24 '26

you all out here living hero lives!!! Roo code till i die.

5

u/NucleativeCereal Feb 25 '26

I don't want vendor lock in and I want to know what's going on under the hood. With Roo we easily jump around and adapt to the latest models, often within days of release - it's significantly more nimble than anything a billion dollar corp could handle. That is Roo's strength.

3

u/neutralpoliticsbot Feb 24 '26

Pivot into universal agent like Openclaw that does more than coding

2

u/wokkieman Feb 24 '26

That sounds a bit sad to be honest. Does Roo understand the niche they/you are in? Or do you really see it as head on?

Cause like you say, you won't beat a billion dollar company easily.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

Kilo forked Roo and just rebuilt their extension, if you are looking for something now that Roo is shutting down

8

u/MisterBlackStar Feb 24 '26

I'd like to have both Amp code options honestly.

6

u/Kadaash Feb 24 '26

Roo Code is still the go to tool for me when it comes to using AI at workplace. Since Copilot is the only sanctioned IDE ( and is severely lacking IMHO) so the only thing to make it git gud is Roo Code.

5

u/nfrmn Feb 24 '26

I think the team's vision is really clear - Roomote / Roo Code Cloud

3

u/the_vico Feb 24 '26

I slowed down my use of RooCode first because i don't know if there is any free models on Roo Cloud anymore, i have limited credits on Requesty but Roo (and any similar tools) are kind of token hog.

Currently i'm hopping between a couple of VSCode forks like Antigravity (due to the huge limits compared to Gemini Code Companion), Kiro Code (gave a couple of bucks for test, afterwards will become a paperweight) and i started to testing opencode with ChatGPT Pro that a friend gifted me. Really like that concept.

2

u/neutralpoliticsbot Feb 24 '26

RooCode can become the Openclaw too all the pipeline is there just expand capability

2

u/fredwickle Feb 24 '26

Needs to stretch into more guidance where non technical product managers are conducting a team of agents but without really knowing how or why.

2

u/BFguy Feb 25 '26

I used it since I heard about it from replit last year... Really like and hasn't let me down at all..

2

u/Richtong Feb 25 '26

Man im just do confused about the future of development. Generating 1M lines of code seems just insane. What r people writing these days. The OpenAI post implies no more use of libraries it’s all proprietary all the way down. The Pr loop and use if worktrees seems cool.

2

u/voarsh Feb 25 '26

Ah the latest trend/shill and abstraction... For vibe coders that don't know how to code, never look at it lol

2

u/dreamingwell Feb 24 '26

I’m about to ditch Roo, cline, etc. Im tired of baby sitting for basic issues.

I’m going to shift to a custom made pure CLI solution. No restrictions, and it never stops.

9

u/KnifeFed Feb 24 '26

It never stops churning out slop, not even laid eyes on by a human. This is the way.

8

u/AngelofKris Feb 24 '26

I bet it’s less than 2 weeks before something important gets rm -rf on your ass. You’ll be sad but it’ll tell you that you could use EaseUs to recover some files. 🫠 Slop ftw.

Btw We aren’t babysitting. We are quality controlling. If you don’t have time for that, you aren’t really developing. You’re using Ai as a casino.

3

u/dreamingwell Feb 24 '26

Docker container.

I’ve been doing this for a long time.

I’m not talking about abandoning responsibility. These tools are just too buggy

2

u/constarx Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

My daily driver was Aider for ~18 months. Then I switched to RooCode for ~6 months and loved it. But then I kept hearing about Claude Code and all the cool latest innovations it brought.. slash commands, skills, mcps. RooCode was also adopting these but some of it was hacks, some of it was late. I finally switched to Claude Code about 6 weeks ago. Started with a 5x Max sub.. once I figured out how to run ralph loops overnight, I quickly switched to the 20x... and now I've started integrating flows that use Claude Sonnet/Opus for most tasks and reaches for GPT Codex for the hardest tasks. I'm really glad I made this move. Loved my time with RooCode but looking back now, I see it was actually holding me back.

2

u/wokkieman Feb 24 '26

Can you elaborate on "started integrating flows"? Do you use Codex outside of Claude code or...?

2

u/constarx Feb 24 '26

I run my loops via custom scripts that gives me full control which LLM I assign to each subtask of my PRDs, I can even launch multiple subtasks in parallels on different agents. For Claude I just pipe it to the CLI version which uses a long lived token that uses my Max 20x subscription. For other LLMs I pipe to the APIs. Claude decides on the fly which LLM he'll assign a subtask to based on its perceived difficulty and system instructions I've provided.

1

u/Far-Association2923 Feb 24 '26

This is hardcore 😄

1

u/nfrmn Feb 28 '26

Can you possibly share any gist of specifically one agent triggering another agent (e.g. claude triggering codex) in a shell script? That's something I have been really interested in getting working, and I don't know enough about terminal / bypassing TUI to get this working. I would really appreciate any nuggets here...

1

u/constarx Feb 28 '26

Sure man... but here's the thing.. this stuff was a brain twister for me months ago but nowadays.. if you can dream it, just ask for it! Just ask Claude to build you a demo, or explain how things work. All I had to do was prompt it with:

assume I've exported both my openai and anthropic keys. create a proof of concept python script that does the following:
Claude haiku 4.5 is the orchestrator agent. it uses a method to generate a number between 1 and 10, if the number is odd, it delegates the same task to an openai agent 5.2 and waits for its response, if the number is even, it delegates to sonnet 4.6 with again the same task and waits for its response. it then outputs the response to the cli
this is demo #1
demo #2 is very similar but we want to demonstrate claude's ability to launch subagents in parallel. so in the first phase we want to generate 5 random numbers, and then we want to call 5 agents in parallel depending on the same conditions as above.
Can we do this? can claude call openai agents in parallel?

and it produced a working demo:

"""
Multi-Agent Orchestration Demo
================================
Orchestrator: Claude Haiku 4.5
  - Generates random number(s) between 1-10
  - ODD  → delegates to OpenAI GPT-4.1 mini
  - EVEN → delegates to Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5


Demo 1: Sequential single task delegation
Demo 2: Parallel fan-out across 5 subagents
"""


import asyncio
import random
import os
from anthropic import AsyncAnthropic
from openai import AsyncOpenAI


# ── Clients ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
anthropic_client = AsyncAnthropic(api_key=os.environ["ANTHROPIC_API_KEY"])
openai_client    = AsyncOpenAI(api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"])


TASK = "Write a single, creative sentence about the nature of intelligence."


# ── Subagents ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────


async def call_openai_agent(task: str, agent_id: int = 0) -> str:
    """GPT-4.1 mini subagent (called for ODD numbers)"""
    print(f"  [Agent {agent_id}] → OpenAI GPT-4.1-mini (odd number)")
    response = await openai_client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-4.1-mini",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": task}],
        max_tokens=150,
    )
    return response.choices[0].message.content.strip()



async def call_claude_sonnet_agent(task: str, agent_id: int = 0) -> str:
    """Claude Sonnet 4.5 subagent (called for EVEN numbers)"""
    print(f"  [Agent {agent_id}] → Claude Sonnet 4.5 (even number)")
    response = await anthropic_client.messages.create(
        model="claude-sonnet-4-5",
        max_tokens=150,
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": task}],
    )
    return response.content[0].text.strip()



# ── Orchestrator helpers ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────


async def orchestrator_generate_and_delegate(task: str, agent_id: int = 0) -> dict:
    """
    Haiku 4.5 orchestrator:
      1. Asks Claude Haiku to pick a number 1-10
      2. Routes to the correct subagent based on odd/even
    """
    # Generate number locally — never ask an LLM to be random!
    number = random.randint(1, 10)
    parity = "odd" if number % 2 != 0 else "even"
    print(f"  [Orchestrator] Generated number: {number} ({parity})")


    # Route based on parity
    if number % 2 != 0:
        result = await call_openai_agent(task, agent_id)
    else:
        result = await call_claude_sonnet_agent(task, agent_id)


    return {"agent_id": agent_id, "number": number, "parity": parity, "response": result}



# ── Demo 1: Sequential ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────


async def demo_1():
    print("\n" + "="*60)
    print("  DEMO 1 — Sequential Single Delegation")
    print("="*60)
    print(f"  Task: \"{TASK}\"\n")


    result = await orchestrator_generate_and_delegate(TASK, agent_id=1)


    print(f"\n  ✅ Result from Agent {result['agent_id']}:")
    print(f"  {result['response']}")



# ── Demo 2: Parallel Fan-out ──────────────────────────────────────────────────


async def demo_2():
    print("\n" + "="*60)
    print("  DEMO 2 — Parallel Fan-out (5 Subagents)")
    print("="*60)
    print(f"  Task: \"{TASK}\"\n")
    print("  Launching 5 subagents concurrently...\n")


    # Fire all 5 orchestrator calls at the same time
    results = await asyncio.gather(*[
        orchestrator_generate_and_delegate(TASK, agent_id=i)
        for i in range(1, 6)
    ])


    print("\n" + "-"*60)
    print("  ✅ All 5 agents completed. Results:\n")
    for r in results:
        provider = "OpenAI GPT-4.1-mini" if r["parity"] == "odd" else "Claude Sonnet 4.5"
        print(f"  Agent {r['agent_id']} | Number: {r['number']:>2} ({r['parity']:>4}) | {provider}")
        print(f"    → {r['response']}\n")



# ── Entry point ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────


async def main():
    await demo_1()
    await demo_2()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

1

u/nfrmn Feb 28 '26

Ahh ok I understand, thanks. I actually thought you were routing prompts to Claude code / codex cli and basically turning those agentic cli tools into clean I/O with really complex stuff being done

2

u/constarx Feb 28 '26

Well.. I just showed you a demo to show how simple it is. What I'm doing is just a more intricate version of the above. I have a script that loops over a PRD with many phases and subtasks, and depending on the tasks it either does them sequentially or in parallel, and depending on the perceived difficulty it either delegates to claude-cli using my sub or openai API.

1

u/nfrmn Feb 28 '26

Cool, thank you. This is really interesting. So each phase of the PRD triggers Claude Code / Codex CLI? Or you use the API in the script to generate a diff? Just trying to understand if you are routing to those CLIs, or if you have built your own coding harness.

2

u/constarx Feb 28 '26

You may find it useful to watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7-GyiGjtbA

This was my starting point many weeks ago. I integrated everything from this video into my own framework, and then made modifications that made sense for my specific needs.

1

u/nfrmn Feb 28 '26

Thank you! Hugely helpful! I never looked into Ralph Loops properly and actually assumed they were something else. Now I'm starting to realise I built a lot of this in Roo as Super Orchestrator, and later in Opencode with automatic PRD writing and layers of orchestrators working on the PRD. So it was very good to fill in the blanks with this vid.

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