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

Sadly review isn't enough. I just today I found some code that I reviewed 2 months where the developer clearly used an agent to generate the code and I completely missed some really dumb garbage the agent put in. The agent took a simple function that returns an object with some data and turned it into a mess that required multiple mocks in the tests (also generated by the agent).

The dev is a junior and a clear example of what is to come, inexperienced people thinking coding is getting an agent to get something to pass CI.

The tech debt is accelerating exponentially!

The first thing anyone should do is immediately understand that they are in a finite-sum adversarial relationship with all of their vendors. If you're getting repeatably and unambiguously food outcomes with Claude Code you're either in the bandit arm where high twitter follower count people go or you're counting cards in a twelve deck shoe and it'll be 24 soon. Switch to opencode today, the little thing in the corner is a clock, and a prominent clock is more or less proof you're not in a casino.

There is another key observation that took me a long time to internalize, which is that the loss surface of formalism is not convex: most of us have tried to lift the droids of of the untyped lambda calculus and into System F, and this does not as a general thing go well. But a droid in the untyped lambda calculus will with 100% likelihood eventually Superfund your codebase, no exceptions.

The droids are wildly "happy" for lack of a better term in CIC but the sweet spot is System F Omega. A web app that's not in Halogen is an unforced error now: pure vibecoders can do lastingly valuable work in PureScript, and they can't in React, which is irretrievably broken under any sane effects algebra.

So AI coding is kind of a mean reversion in a sense. Knuth and Lamport and Hoare and Djikstra had an LLM: it was an army of guys in short-sleeved dress shirts with half a page of fanfold system prompt on every page. That is automatable now, but there's a straightforward algorithm for remaining relevant: crank the ambition up until Opus 4.5 is whiffing.

Computer Scientist is still a high impact job. The cast of Office Space is redundant. But we kinda knew that the first time we saw Office Space.

Personally I'm working harder than ever on harder problems than ever with pretty extreme AI assist hygiene: you spend all your time on hard problems with serious impact. The bueden of understanding the code and being able to quit vim has gone up but down, and mathematics is absorbing computer programming.

The popular narrative about Claude Code 10x ing JavaScript projects is maskirovska

* Unrefactorable and highly boilerplatey

* Probably too big a job and low impact to rewrite as IaC

* AI can do all that tedious plumbing well

* Since result is a depoyment not executable code it suffices to check correct resources are created.

I'm not saying they didn't get a speedup or you can't get a speedup. I'm just wondering how they determined that speedup and how reliable they are as a source for the statement "using AI will improve your performance".

As the other thread was discussing, it is a difficult thing to prove but some (debatable) measurement proves more then anecdotal stories. And I am trying to probe for some sources where these kind of statements are proven as I am a programmer continually judging the tools available to me.

And on the flip side there is at least some evidence that programmers often overstate/overestimate their speedup when using AI.