For simple stand alone things it works
Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
281–290 of 478 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#282You 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…
What is the actual value of using agentic LLMs (rather than just LLM-powered autocomplete in your IDE) if it requires this much supervision and handholding? When is it actually faster / more effective?
Why use a nailgun instead of a hammer, if the nailgun still requires supervision and handholding?
Example: Say I discover a problem in the SPA design that can be fixed by tuning some CSS.
Without LLM: Dig around the code until I find the right spot. If it's been some months since I was there this can easily cost five minutes.
With LLM: Explain what is wrong. Perhaps description is vague ("cancel button is too invisible, I need another solution") or specific ("1px more margin here please"). The LLM makes a best effort fix within 30 secs. The diff points to just the right location so you can fine tune it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#283I had some successes refactoring one instance of a pattern in our codebase, along with all the class' call sites, and having codex identify all the others instances of said pattern and refactor them in parallel by following my initial refactor.
Similarly, I had it successfully migrate a third (so far) of our tests from an old testing framework to a new one, one test suite at a time.
We also had a race condition, and providing Claude Code with both the unsymbolicated trace and the build’s symbols, it successfully symbolicated the trace, identified the cause. When prompted, it identified most of the similar instances of the responsible pattern in our codebase (the one it missed was an indirect one).
I didn’t care much about the suggested fixes on that last one, but consider it a success too, especially since I could just keep working on other stuff while it chugged along.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#284The only approach I've tried that seems to work reasonably well, and consistently, was the following: Make a commit. Give Claude a task that's not particularly open ended, the closer to pure "monkey work" boilerplate nonsense the task is, the better (which is also the sort of code I don't want do deal with myself). Preferably it should be something that only touches a file or two in the codebase unless it is a trivia…
> I don't bother giving it guidelines or guardrails or anything of the sort Where do you give these guardrails? In the chat or CLAUDE.md? Basic level information like how to build and test the project belong in CLAUDE.md, it knows to re-check that now and then.
Yeah, CLAUDE.md. Sometimes it just ignores what was in there after the context window gets big enough (as it tends to with planning mode).
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
as someone who worked at the company, i understood the meaning behind the tweet without the additional clarification. i think she assumed too much shared context when making the tweet
A principal engineer at Google made a public post on the World Wide Web and assumed some shared Google/Claude-context. Do you hear yourself?
Working in a large scale org gets you accustomed to general problems in decision making that aren’t that obvious. Like I totally understood what she means and in my head nodded with “yeah that tracks”.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#286It 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 experience here.
On some tasks like build scripts, infra and CI stuff, I am getting a significant speedup. Maybe I am 2x faster on these tasks, when measured from start to PR.
I am working on a HPC project[1] that requires more careful architectural thinking. Trying to let the LLM do the whole task most often fail, or produce low quality code (even with top models like Opus 4.5).
What works well though is "assisted" coding. I am usually writing the interface code (e.g. headers in C++) with some help from the agent, and then let the LLM do the actual implementation of these functions/methods. Then I do final adjustments. Writing a good AGENTS.md helps a lot. I might be 30% faster on these tasks.
It seems to match what I see from the PRs I am reviewing: we are getting these slightly more often than before.
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Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#287Take a look at Github accounts of people pushing it, and you will see a clear pattern - it works, apparently, for a _very_ specific subset of people.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Those are some high profile (celebrity) developers. I wonder if they have measured their results? I believe that the perceived speed up of AI coding is often different from reality. The following paper backs this idea https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 . Can you provide data that objects this view, based on these (celebrity) developers or otherwise?
Almost off-topic, but got me curious: How can I measure this myself? Say I want to put concrete numbers to this, and actually measure, how should I approach it?
My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.
So how would I actually go about and be able to provide data for this?
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#289A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/200765974…
That, uh, says a lot about Google, doesn't it?
Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
#290I 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.
> 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.
How would you end up using types but not have any type checking? What's the point of the types?