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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?

#421

Post by keybored »

grayhatter wrote: post #406
keybored wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping. Maybe with a later addendum. Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons. > when writing an untargeted promo post. lol.

> My bad. I will be more mindful tomorrow when someone at a big tech company yet again make-a-mistake in the same direction of AI hyping. Are you mad at them for playing the game, or mad that that's the game they have to play to advance at their company? > Like journalists that write about a Fatal Storm In Houston and you read down to the eighth paragraph and it turns out the fatality were among pigeons. I don't know…

> I don't know; I guess I hold people who post on twitter so they can self-promo, or who have attention because they work at $company, to a slightly different standard than I would hold a journalist writing a news article?

I know. One of them has a higher salary.

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

#422

Post by akoboldfrying »

neomantra wrote: post #346
akoboldfrying wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/ Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)

That is hilarious.... and to prove the point of this whole comment thread, I created reddit-kv for us. It seems to work against a mock, I did not test it against Reddit itself as I think it violates ToS. My prompts are in the repo. https://github.com/ConAcademy/reddit-kv/blob/main/README.md

Typo-Driven Development!

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

#423

Post by greazy »

> Lately I’ve seen a push toward minimal or nonexistent code review, with the claim that we should move from “validating architecture” to “validating behavior.”

This is very bad. A programmers output is code, when we begin to measure the output of code as the primary product of a programmers work we will fall into a death spiral of unmaintainable code. I still strongly believe we write code for other humans, not for machines. Yes, yes we need to solve problems and you may argue that is the true measure of code. However this argument ignores maintenance and continued developmental requirements.

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

#424

Post by whattheheckheck »

aprdm wrote: post #402
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…

Why limit to LLMs and agents ? This is true about everything you see advertised to you. When I went to opensource conference (or whatever it was called) in San Diego ~8y ago, there were so many Kubernetes people. When you talked with them nobody was actually using k8s in production and were clearly devrel/paid people. Now it seems to be everywhere... so be careful with what you ignore too

Because they are pitching to replace 50% of white collar jobs...

Doesn't seem like its that necessary to run marketing campaigns if that's the case... people would just do it if it's possible

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

#425

Post by AstroBen »

dust42 wrote: post #216
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…

> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. Exactly. But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development. It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the um…

even for CRUD I'm finding it quite frustrating. The question is no longer whether AI can write the code you specify: it can

It just writes terrible code I'd never want to maintain. Can I refactor and have it cleaned up by the AI also? Sure... but then I need to specify exactly how it should go about it and eugh should I just be writing this code myself?

It really excels when there are existing conventions within the app it can use as example

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

#427

Post by aprdm »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #424
aprdm wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why limit to LLMs and agents ? This is true about everything you see advertised to you. When I went to opensource conference (or whatever it was called) in San Diego ~8y ago, there were so many Kubernetes people. When you talked with them nobody was actually using k8s in production and were clearly devrel/paid people. Now it seems to be everywhere... so be careful with what you ignore too

Because they are pitching to replace 50% of white collar jobs... Doesn't seem like its that necessary to run marketing campaigns if that's the case... people would just do it if it's possible

Do you think that won't happen ?

As a very silly example, my father in law has a school in Mexico and he is now using chatgtp to generate all of their visual materials that they used to pay someone to do in the past.

They also used to pay someone to take school pictures for the books to look professional, now they use AI to make it look good/professional.

My father in law has no knowledge in technology, he uses chatgtp daily to do professional work for his school. That's already 2 jobs gone.

People must be hiding under a rock if they don't think this will have big consequences to society

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

#428

Post by morisil »

More than a year ago I built my own coding agent called Claudine. I also made agentic anthropic-sdk-kotlin and few other AI libraries for the ecosystem. Maybe this low-level experience allows me to use these tools to deliver in 2 days what would have taken 2 months before.

My advice - embrace TDD. Work with AI on tests, not implementation - your implementation is disposable, to be regenerated, tests fully specify your system through contracts. This is more tricky for UI than for logic. Embracing architectures allowing to test view model in separation might help. I general anything reducing cognitive load during inference time is worth doing.

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

#429

Post by marcus_holmes »

defatigable wrote: post #207
marcus_holmes wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or does every post starting with "Great Idea!" or "Great point!" or "You're so right!" or similar just sound like an LLM is posting? Or is this a new human linguistic tic that is being caused by prolonged LLM usage? Or is it just me?

:-) I feel you. Perhaps I should have ended my post with "Would you like me to construct a good prompt for your planning agent?" to really drive us into the uncanny valley? (My writing style is very dry and to the point, you may have noticed. I looked at my post and thought, "Huh, I should try and emotionally engage with this poster, we seem like we're having a shared experience." And so I figured, heck, I'll throw i…

Excellent reply :) And yes, maybe that's it, that the LLM emotion feels forced so any forced emotion now feels like an LLM wrote it.

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

#430

Post by diamond559 »

No, it's clear that we are being lied to, you are not crazy. One of the only uses for these llms ironically is to create fake astroturf bots just believable enough to trick the masses who don't understand the technology. It works sometimes, but as you know sometimes is not good enough for most code that people actually need to you know, work.
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