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 · 46m ago
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
jayshah5696 · 58m ago
sub agents adding isolating context is the real deal rest is just langgraph react agent
seabass · 1h ago
Is there more info on how the todo list tool is a noop? How exactly does that work?
lmeyerov · 11m ago
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/...
It is relatively easy to get the agent to use it, most of the work for us is surfacing it in the UI.
JyB · 1h ago
Same question. I don’t understand what they mean by that.
It obviously seem pretty central to how Claude Code is so effective.
kjhughes · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
just for chain of thought TodoWrite would be sufficient as a tool wouldn‘t it?
TrainedMonkey · 21m ago
My understanding is that it is basically a prompt about making a TODO list.
ttul · 1h ago
The context will contain a record that the tool call took place. The todo list is never actually fetched.
kobstrtr · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
My guess is the todo list is carried across “compress” points where the agent summarizes and restarts with fresh context + the summary
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
kiro from amazon does both tasks (in tasks.md) and specs.
Too many tools soon, choose what works for you
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/...
It is relatively easy to get the agent to use it, most of the work for us is surfacing it in the UI.
The author has done a pretty good job of reverse engineering Claude Code and explaining the architecture.