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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?

#251

Post by embedding-shape »

zh3 wrote: post #228

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…

It's a good demonstration of when agents still don't get everything right when you place things into Markdown documentation. You have to be really valiant and verify everything from top to bottom, if you want to control how things are implemented to that degree, otherwise the agent will still take shortcuts where they can.

In https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart/blob/68ab2387a0c44e... for example, it doesn't actually do SSE at all, instead it queues up a complete HTTP response each time, returns once and then closes the stream, so basically a normal HTTP endpoint, "labeled" as a SSE one. SSE is mentioned a bunch of times in the docs, and the files/types/functions are labeled as such, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on internally, from what I could understand. Happy to stand corrected though!

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

#252

Post by zh3 »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #247
zh3 wrote: post #228

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…

Pretty neat! Is there a name for the UI style of the web server page? I've noticed several web apps have a similar style to that.

I didn't ask for a style, it's just what Claude came up with by default. Here's what happened just now when I asked it:-

   What was the inspiration for the CSS styling of this web page?                                                                    

  ● Looking at the CSS styling in live_plot.html, the inspiration appears to be Tailwind CSS and modern minimalist design trends.

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

#253

Post by Adrig »

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…

A lot of comments reads like a knee jerk reaction to the Twitter crowd claiming they vibe code apps making 1m$ in 2 weeks.

As a designer I'm having a lot of success vibe coding small use cases, like an alternative to lovable to prototype in my design system and share prototypes easily.

All the devs I work with use cursor, one of them (front) told me most of the code is written by AI. In the real world agentic coding is used massively

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

#254

Post by kqr »

zh3 wrote: post #228

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…

Have you reviewed the code? What were the problems with it? Where did it do things better than you'd expect of humans? Have you compared the effort of making changes to it to the effort required for similar, human-written software?

I don't think anyone says it's not possible to get the LLM to write code. The problems OP has with them is that the code they write starts out good but then quickly devolves when the LLMs get stuck in the weird ruts they have.

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

#255

Post by embedding-shape »

zh3 wrote: post #252
bobmcnamara wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty neat! Is there a name for the UI style of the web server page? I've noticed several web apps have a similar style to that.

I didn't ask for a style, it's just what Claude came up with by default. Here's what happened just now when I asked it:- What was the inspiration for the CSS styling of this web page? ● Looking at the CSS styling in live_plot.html, the inspiration appears to be Tailwind CSS and modern minimalist design trends.

Just as a heads up, LLMs doesn't actually understand why they do what they do, you asking about it will make them reason about why it happened, but it's not the "motivation", it's essentially guesses with no anchoring to reality.

Just thought I'd clarify as I've seen prompts like this and people thinking this is the actual motivation from the "inside the LLM" or whatever, which is a bit far away from the truth.

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

#256

Post by donw »

xsh6942 wrote: post #249

It really depends by what you mean by "it works". A retrospective of the last 6months. I've had great success coding infra (terraform). It at least 10x the generation of easily verifiable and tedious to write code. Results were audited to death as the client was highly regulated. Professional feature dev is hit and miss for sure, although getting better and better. We're nowhere near full agentic coding. However, by…

Same here. You have to slice things small enough for the agent to execute effectively, but beyond that, it’s magic.

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

#258

Post by zh3 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #251
zh3 wrote: post #228

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…

It's a good demonstration of when agents still don't get everything right when you place things into Markdown documentation. You have to be really valiant and verify everything from top to bottom, if you want to control how things are implemented to that degree, otherwise the agent will still take shortcuts where they can. In https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart/blob/68ab2387a0c44e... for example, it doesn't actu…

Yes, I haven't even read most of the files, just threw it up there as an example for the OP (I too am tired of the lack of examples, so stepped up to the plate on this one).

As a personal bit of development last weekend. I can see inconsistences myself, some of which result from scope creep during development (starting with the idea of a text-only app and then grafting on the web side) - it literally only started because I wanted a working example of bluetooth and dBus in C, the rest of it just joined the ride.

As for the SSE, no expert on that myself, however if you watch the messages in the browser console it appears to push updates with sporadic notes about using polling instead.

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

#259

Post by zh3 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #255
zh3 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't ask for a style, it's just what Claude came up with by default. Here's what happened just now when I asked it:- What was the inspiration for the CSS styling of this web page? ● Looking at the CSS styling in live_plot.html, the inspiration appears to be Tailwind CSS and modern minimalist design trends.

Just as a heads up, LLMs doesn't actually understand why they do what they do, you asking about it will make them reason about why it happened, but it's not the "motivation", it's essentially guesses with no anchoring to reality. Just thought I'd clarify as I've seen prompts like this and people thinking this is the actual motivation from the "inside the LLM" or whatever, which is a bit far away from the truth.

Fair enough, I did ask for "inspiration" through rather than "motivation" - mainly because I recall a comment on here a few days ago that LLMs are carefully trained to never reveal where the training material came from. So the prompt was aimed at working around that.
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