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

The point I was making is about the baseline capability that even sceptics tend to concede: if LLMs were “only” good at CRUD and task automation (which I don’t think is their ceiling), that alone is already economically and socially transformative.

A huge share of white-collar work is effectively humans doing CRUD and coordination. Compressing or automating that layer will have second- and third-order effects on productivity, labour markets, economics, and politics globally for decades.

> I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.

What’s the definition of high-quality? For the project I was working on, I just needed it to work without any obvious bugs. It’s not an app for an enterprise business critical purpose, life critical (it’s not a medical device or something), or regulated industry. It’s just a consumer app for convenience and novelty.

The app is fast, smaller than 50MB, doesn’t have any bugs that the AI couldn’t fix for my test users. Sounds like the code is high quality to me.

I literally don’t give a shit what the code looks like. You gotta remember that code is just one of many methods to implement business logic. If we didn’t have to write code to achieve the result of making apps and websites it would have no value and companies wouldn’t hire software engineers.

I don’t write all my apps this way, but in this specific case letting Jesus take the wheel made sense and saved me a ton of time.

What I do is - I write a skeleton. Then I write a test suite (nothing fancy just 1 or sanity tests). I'll usually start with some logic that I want to implement and break it down into XYZ steps. Now one thing to note here - TDD is very useful. If it makes your head hurt it means the requirements arent very clear. Otherwise its relatively easy to write test cases. Second thing, if your code isnt testable in parts, it probably needs some abstraction and refactoring. I typically test at the level of abstraction boundaries. eg if something needs to write to database i'll write a data layer abstraction (standard stuff) and test that layer by whatever means are appropriate. Once the spec reaches a level where its a matter of typing, I'll add annotations in the code and add todos for codex. Then I instruct it with some context, by this time its much easier to write the context since TdD clears out the brain fog. And I tell it to finish the todos and only the todos. My most used prompt is "DONT CHANGE ANYTHING APART FROM THE FUNCTIONS MARKED AS TODO." I also have an AGENTS.md file listing any common library patterns to follow. And if the code isnt correct, I'll ask codex to redo until it gets to a shape I understand. Most of the time it gets things the 2nd time around, aka iteration is easier than ground 0. Usually it takes me a day to finish a part or atleast I plan it that way. For me, codex does save me a whole bunch of time but only because of the upfront investment.

You personally should just ignore the YouTubers most of them are morons. If you'd like to checkout AI coding flows, checkout the ones from the masters like Antirez, Mitchell H. Thats a better way of learning the right tricks.

What would be enough to compromise your ethics and morals? I'm sure they can accommodate.