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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?

#381

Post by grayhatter »

embedding-shape wrote: post #350
buckwheatmilk wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals What would be enough to compromise your ethics and morals? I'm sure they can accommodate.

Hah, after submitting my comment, I actually though about it because I knew someone would eventually ask :) I'm fortunate enough to live a very comfortable life after working myself to death, so I think for 20,000,000 USD I'd do it, happily so. 2,000,000 would be too little. So probably between those sit the real price to purchase my morals and ethics :)

Best I can do is t'ree fiddy.

I can definitely be bought for much much less. But only because I'm pretty sure I could rave about some AI platform while still being honest about it. Why do you draw such a hard ethical line? I agree with your sentiment, AI is currently a net negative on the world that I care about. But I also believe people when they say it helps them. Despite their inability to articulate anything useful to me, or that I can understand.

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

#382

Post by grayhatter »

keybored wrote: post #197
thornewolf wrote: post #195

Earlier 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?

People make mistakes, it's not that deep. The correct incentive to encourage is admitting, and understand and forgiving when necessary because you don't want to encourage people to hide mistakes out of shame. That only makes things worse.

Especially considering forgetting the delta between yours and someone else's shared context is extremely common. And the least egregious mistake you can make when writing an untargeted promo post.

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

#383

Post by blackoil »

embedding-shape wrote: post #240
fhd2 wrote: post #191

Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not. Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying the…

> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not. Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere. Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must…

How can we be sure you aren't paid by bear cartel to push this post?

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

#384

Post by rahimnathwani »

egorfine wrote: post #380
rahimnathwani wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After you created a spec did you ask the Claude to break down the spec into epics and tasks? I've found that helps a lot.

I believe that's something it does automatically now. In the past it did help a lot, but now it's the default behavior.

I've seen it create plans of 6-8 steps. I have not seen it automatically decide to break down a spec into 30+ tasks.

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

#386

Post by laserlight »

defatigable wrote: post #354
laserlight wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider the proposed workflow agentic. When you review each step, give feedback after each step, it's simply development with LLMs.

Interesting. What would make the workflow "agentic" in your mind? The AI implementing the task fully autonomously, never getting any human feedback? To me "agentic" in this context essentially that the LLM has the ability to operate autonomously, so execute tools on my behalf, etc. So for example my coding agents will often run unit tests, run code generation tools, etc. I've even used my agents to fix issues with gi…

IMHO, agentic workflow is the autonomous execution of a detailed plan. Back-and-forth between LLM and developer is fine in the planning stage. Then, the agent is supposed to overcome any difficulties or devise solutions to unplanned situations. Otherwise, Cursor had been able to develop in a tight loop of writing and running tests, followed by fixing bugs, before “agentic” became a buzzword.

Perhaps “agentic” initially referred to this simple loop, but the milestone was achieved so quickly that the meaning shifted. Regardless, I could be wrong.

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

#387

Post by egorfine »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #384
egorfine wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's something it does automatically now. In the past it did help a lot, but now it's the default behavior.

I've seen it create plans of 6-8 steps. I have not seen it automatically decide to break down a spec into 30+ tasks.

Ah, this.

Of course, but if your single request to claude code requires 30+ tasks then it's certainly way too big for llm to code from scratch.

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

#388

Post by woooooo »

blackoil wrote: post #383
embedding-shape wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not. Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere. Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must…

How can we be sure you aren't paid by bear cartel to push this post?

Bear cartel is a bunch of curmudgeons without tons of VC money. If they are being unfair, its purely for love of the game.

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

#389

Post by rahimnathwani »

egorfine wrote: post #387
rahimnathwani wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen it create plans of 6-8 steps. I have not seen it automatically decide to break down a spec into 30+ tasks.

Ah, this. Of course, but if your single request to claude code requires 30+ tasks then it's certainly way too big for llm to code from scratch.

This is false.

I've had Claude Code successfully work on a spec that requires 30+ tasks, with my only input being 'great, keep going'.

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

#390

Post by egorfine »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #389
egorfine wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this. Of course, but if your single request to claude code requires 30+ tasks then it's certainly way too big for llm to code from scratch.

This is false. I've had Claude Code successfully work on a spec that requires 30+ tasks, with my only input being 'great, keep going'.

Excellent!

If LLMs are capable of delivering completely automatically a solution that includes that many tasks then surely in 6 months from now programmers will be out of job.

/s

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