Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by arjie » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

I think I have evidence it works for me in that a bunch of unfinished projects suddenly finished themselves and work for me in the way I want them to. So whatever delta there was between my ideas and my execution, it has been closed for me.

If I'm being honest, the people who get utility out of this tool don't need any tutorials. The smattering of ideas that people mention is sufficient. The people who don't get utility out of this tool are insistent that it is useless, which isn't particularly inspiring to the kind of person who would write a good tutorial.

Consequently, you're probably going to have to pay someone if you want a handholding. And at the end you might believe it wasn't worth it.

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

#222

Post by never_giveup » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:00 AM UTC

if my understanding is correct, @steipete is using exclusively coding agents, and imo he does a good job (see clawd) https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed

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

#223

Post by jpc0 » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

In my experience agentic coding is still bad a context management.

I can get amazing results from a chatbot based workflow where I manually provide any context needed, if the agent can happily pull files into context on it's own it tends to pull in too much or completely irrelevant stuff and the quality of the output suffers.

It's significantly faster in many cases that having written the code by hand myself.

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

#224

Post by esailija » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:03 AM UTC

achierius wrote: post #161

molteanu wrote: post #156

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.

I don't think so. Imagine it was vice versa, someone saying they knew JS and were weak at C/C++/Java.

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

#225

Post by K0IN » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #212

resonious wrote: post #165

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…

Typescript is a great type system for agents to use. It's expressive and the compiler is much faster than rust, so turn around is much quicker. I'm slowly accepting that Python's optional typing is mistake with AI agents, especially with human coders too. It's too easy for a type to be wrong and if someone doesn't have typechecking turned on that mistake propagates.

Same for typescript, by default you still got `any`, best case (for humans and LLM) is a strict linter that will give you feedback on what is wrong. But then (and I saw this a couple times with non-experienced devs), you or the AI has to know it. Write a strict linter config, use it, and as someone with not that much coding knowledge, you may be unfamiliar and thus not asking.

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

#226

Post by drewstiff » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

jesse__ wrote: post #175

defatigable wrote: post #107

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.

Well a medium project for me takes 3 years, so obviously I am the best out of everyone /s

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

#227

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

keybored wrote: post #215

dagss wrote: post #193

I've been programming for 20 years, and I've always been under-estimating how long things will take (no, not pressured by anyone to give firm estimates, just talking about informally when prioritizing work order together). The other day I gave an estimate to my co-worker and he said "but how long is it really going to take, because you always finish a lot quicker than you say, you say two weeks and then it takes two…

I was expecting that evidence part that OP asked for in the top comments.

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by zh3 » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

I'll bite.

Here's my realtime Bluetooth heart rate monitor for linux, with text output and web interface.

   https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart

This was 100% written by Claude Code, my input was limited to mostly accepting Claude suggestions except a couple of cases where I could make suggestions to speed up development (skipping some tests I knew would work).

Particularly interesting because I didn't expect this to work, let along not to write any code. Note that I limited it to pure C with limited dependencies; initial prompt was just to get text output ("Heart Rate 76bpm"), when it got to that point I told Claude to add a web interface followed by creating a realtime graph to show the interface in use.

Every file is claude generated. AMA.

edit: this was particularly interesting as it had to test against the HRM sensor I was wearing during development, and to cope with bluetooth devices appearing and disappearing all the time. It took about a day for the whole thing and cost around $25.

further edit: I am by no means an expert with Claude (haven't even got to making a claude.md file); the one real objective here was to get a working example of using dBus to talk to blueZ in C, something I've failed at (more than once) before.

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

#229

Post by davidfstr » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #212

resonious wrote: post #165

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…

Typescript is a great type system for agents to use. It's expressive and the compiler is much faster than rust, so turn around is much quicker. I'm slowly accepting that Python's optional typing is mistake with AI agents, especially with human coders too. It's too easy for a type to be wrong and if someone doesn't have typechecking turned on that mistake propagates.

You should not be using Python types without a type checker in use to enforce them.

With a type checker on, types are fantastic for catching missed cases early.

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

#230

Post by margorczynski » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

edanm wrote: post #157

NoPicklez wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.

Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point? Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' wor…

I think it is a mix of ego and fear - basically "I'm too smart to be replaced by a machine" and "what I'm gonna do if I'm replaced?".

The second part is something I think a lot about now after playing around with Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity and extrapolating where this is all going.