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

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn’t you work out a more manageable billing structure with them?! Or to put it another way: if it took you 10 minutes a week with spreadsheets to even figure out what their bill is, how on earth did they verify your invoices were even correct? And if they couldn’t—or if it took more than 10 minutes each week—why wouldn’t they prefer a billing system they could verify they were being paid correctly?

Jesus! is this HN or personal finance forum? Who cares why they do it a certain way. Did they ask for your advices?

If you work like this in a company, you’ll end up with overcomplicated mess.

Now, people with Claude Code, are ready to produce a big pile of shit in a short time.

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

#172
My gf manages to get paid using Cursor/Copilot, despite not being able to branch herself out of a loop

In my experience Copilots work expertly at CRUD'ing inside a well structured project, and for MVPs in languages you aren't an expert on (Rust, C/C++ in my case)

The biggest demerit is that agents are increasingly trying to be "smart" and using powershell search/replace or writing scripts to skimp on tokens, with results that make me unreasonably angry

I tried adding i18n to an old react project, and copilot used all my credits + 10 USD because it kept shitting everything up with its maddening, idiotic use if search replace

If it had simply ingested each file and modified them only once, it would have been cheaper

As you can tell, I am still salty about it

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

#174
post #127

Coding agent is a perfect simulation of a junior developer working under you. Developer that will tell you - “yes I can do that” about any language and any problem and will never ask you any questions trying very hard to appear competent. Your job is to put them in constraints and give granular and clear tasks. Be aware that junior developer has very basic knowledge about architecture. The good is that it does not si…

it also doesnt simulate the part where the junior actually learns and is less clueless 6 months from now, unfortunately

That's not quite true actually, the context window has increased and models have definitely gotten smarter over the last year. So far you can think that part is being simulated.

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

#175

I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools. I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools. A few very concrete advantage…

> I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually

A 1-week project is a medium-scale project?! That's tiny, dude. A medium project for me is like 3 months of 12h days.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's a very good point. The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in? I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up w…

How can I tell? Yes, the code looks quite a bit more polished. I'm not expert enough in JS to, e.g., know the cleanest method to inspect and modify the DOM, but I can look at code that does and tell if the approach it's using is sensible or not. Surely you've had the experience of a domain where you can evaluate the quality of the end product, even if you can't create a high quality product on your own?

Concretely in this case, I'd implemented an approach that used jQuery listeners to listen for DOM updates. Antigravity rewrote it to an approach that avoided the jQuery dependency entirely, using native MutationObservers. The code is sensible. It's noticeably more performant than the approach I crafted by hand. Antigravity allowed me to easily add a number of new features to my extension that I would have found tricky to add by hand. The UI looks quite a bit nicer than before I used AI tools to update it. Would these enhancements have been hard for an expert in Chrome extensions to implement? Probably not. But I'm not that expert, and AI coding tools allowed me to do them.

That was not actually the main thrust of my post, it's just a nice side benefit I've experienced. In the main domain where I use coding tools, at work, I work in languages where I'm quite a bit more proficient (Golang/Python). There, the quality of code that the AI tools generate is not better than I write by hand. The initial revisions are generally worse. But they're quite a bit faster than I write by hand, and if I iterate with the coding tools I can get to implementations that are as good as I would write by hand, and a lot faster.

I understand the bias towards skepticism. I have no particular dog in this fight, it doesn't bother me if you don't use these tools. But OP asked for peoples' experiences so I thought I'd share.

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

#177

You fundamentally misunderstand AI assisted coding if you think it does the work for you, or that it gets it right, or that it can be trusted to complete a job. It is an assistant not a team mate. If you think that getting it wrong, or bugs, or misunderstandings, or lost code, or misdirections, are AI "failing", then yes you will fail to understand or see the value. The point is that a good AI assisted developer stee…

"You're holding it wrong"

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very good point. The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in? I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up w…

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.

Yep. I have plenty of experience in languages that use C-style syntax, enough to easily understand code written in other languages that occur nearby in the syntactical family tree. I'm not steeped in JS enough to know the weird gotchas of the type system, or know the standard library well, etc. But I can read the code fine.

If I'd asked an AI coding tool to write something up for me in Haskell, I would have no idea if it had done a good job.

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

#179
post #105
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to understand the theory of mind, I just tell it what to compose. Writing the actual lines after that takes longer than not writing them!

What do you mean you don’t need to understand? So what do you do when there’s a bug that an LLM can’t fix? If your bottleneck is typing the code, you must be a junior programmer.

I don't need to understand the theory of mind because I don't have the LLM design the code, I tell it what the design is. If I need something, I can read the functions I told it to implement, which is really simple.

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

#180

I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools. I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools. A few very concrete advantage…

Great advice. > Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible. I have recently added a step before that when beginning a project with Claude Code: invoke the AskUserQuestionTool and have it ask me questions about what I want to do and what approaches I prefer. It helps to clarify my thinking, and the specs it then produces are much better than if I had written them myself. I should note, though, that I am a pure v…

Great idea! That's actually the very next improvement I was planning on making to my coding flow: building a sub agent that is purely designed to study the codebase and create a structured implementation plan. Every large project I work on has the same basic initial steps (study the codebase, discuss the plan with me, etc) so it makes sense to formalize this in an agent I specialize for the purpose.
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