Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

JavaScript isn't the only programming language around. I'm not the strongest around with JS either but I can figure it out as necessary -- knowing C/C++/Java/whatever means you can still grok "this looks better than that" for most cases.

My colleague coded a feature with Code Claude in a day. The code looks good, also seemingly works. The code was reviewed and pushed out to production.

The problem: there is no way, he verified the code in any way. The business logic behind the feature would take probably few days to check for correctness. But if it looks good -> done. Let the customer check it. Of course, he claims “he reviewed it”.

It feels to me, we just skip doing half the things proper senior devs did, and claim we’re faster.

I think one fatal flaw is letting the agent build the app from scratch. I've had huge success with agents, but only on existing apps that were architected by humans and have established conventions and guardrails. Agents are really bad at architecture, but quite good at following suit.

Other things that seem to contribute to success with agents are:

- Static type systems (not tacked-on like Typescript)

- A test suite where the tests cover large swaths of code (i.e. not just unit testing individual functions; you want e2e-style tests, but not the flaky browser kind)

With all the above boxes ticked, I can get away with only doing "sampled" reviews. I.e. I don't review every single change, but I do review some of them. And if I find anything weird that I had missed from a previous change, I to tell it to fix it and give the fix a full review. For architectural changes, I plan the change myself, start working on it, then tell the agent to finish.

Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.

For me, the only metric that matters is wall-time between initial idea and when it's solid enough that you don't have to think about it.

Agentic coding is very similar to frameworks in this regard:

1. If the alignment is right, you have saved time.

2. If it's not right, it might take longer.

3. You won't have clear evidence of which of these cases applies until changing course becomes too expensive.

4. Except, in some cases, this doesn't apply and it's obvious... Probably....

I have a (currently dormant) project https://onolang.com/ that I need to get back to that tries to balance these exact concerns. It's like half written. Go to the docs part to see the idea.