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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?

#61

Post by znsksjjs »

antonvs wrote: post #27
proc0 wrote: post #3

My experience is the same. In short, agents cannot plan ahead, or plan at a high level. This means they have a blindspot for design. Since they cannot design properly, it limits the kind of projects that are viable to smaller scopes (not sure exactly how small but in my experience, extremely small and simple). Anything that exceeds this abstract threshold has a good chance of being a net negative, with most of the co…

> Anyone who claims AI is great is not building a large or complex enough app That might be true for agentic coding (caveat below), but AI in the hands of expert users can be very useful - "great" - in building large and complex apps. It's just that it has to be guided and reviewed by the human expert. As for agentic coding, it may depend on the app. For example, Steve Yegge's "beads" system is over a quarter million…

> For example, Steve Yegge's "beads" system is over a quarter million lines of allegedly vibe-coded Go code. But developing a CLI like that may be a sweet spot

Is that really a success? I was just reading an article talking about how sloppy and poorly implemented it is: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

I guess it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it.

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

#62

Post by camel-cdr »

fotcorn wrote: post #34

I used Claude Opus 4.5 inside Cursor to write RISC-V Vector/SIMD code. Specifically Depthwise Convolution and normal Convolution layers for a CNN. I started out by letting it write a naive C version without intrinsic, and validated it against the PyTorch version. Then I asked it (and two other models, Gemini 3.0 and GPT 5.1) to come up with some ideas on how to make it faster using SIMD vector instructions and write…

can you share the code?

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

#63

Post by strange_quark »

3vidence wrote: post #25

Googler opinions are my own. If agentic coding worked as well as people claimed on large codebases I would be seeing a massive shift at my Job... Im really not seeing it. We have access to pretty much all the latest and greatest internally at no cost and it still seems the majority of code is still written and reviewed by people. AI assisted coding has been a huge help to everyone but straight up agentic coding seems…

Yup, same experience here at a much smaller company. Despite management pushing AI coding really hard for at least 6 months and having unlimited access to every popular model and tool, most code still seems to be produced and reviewed by humans.

I still mostly write my own code and I’ve seen our claude code usage and me just asking it questions and generating occasional boilerplate and one-off scripts puts me in the top quartile of users. There are some people who are all in and have it write everything for them but it doesn’t seem like there’s any evidence they’re more productive.

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

#64

Post by ikidd »

If you're building something new, stick with languages/problems/projects that have plenty of analogues in the opensource world and keep your context windows small, with small changes.

One-shotting an application that is very bespoke and niche is not going to go well, and same goes for working on an existing codebase without a pile of background work on helping the model understand it piece by piece, and then restricting it to small changes in well-defined areas.

It's like teaching an intern.

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

#65

Post by orwin »

I still think it's useful, but you have to make a heavy use of the 'plan' mode. I still ask the new hires to avoid doing more than just the plan (or at most generating tests cases), so they can understand the codebase before generating new code inside.

Basically my point of view is that if you don't feel comfortable reviewing your coworkers code, you shouldn't generate code with AI, because you will review it badly and then I will have to catch the bugs and fix it (happened 24 hours ago). If you generate code, you better understand where it can generate side effects.

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

#66

Post by emilecantin »

A loop I've found that works pretty well for bugs is this:

- Ask Claude to look at my current in-progress task (from Github/Jira/whatever) and repro the bug using the Chrome MCP.

- Ask it to fix it

- Review the code manually, usually it's pretty self-contained and easy to ensure it does what I want

- If I'm feeling cautious, ask it to run "manual" tests on related components (this is a huge time-saver!)

- Ask it to help me prepare the PR: This refers to instructions I put in CLAUDE.md so it gives me a branch name, commit message and PR description based on our internal processes.

- I do the commit operations, PR and stuff myself, often tweaking the messages / description.

- Clear context / start a new conversation for the next bug.

On a personal project where I'm less concerned about code quality, I'll often do the plan->implementation approach. Getting pretty in-depth about your requirements ovbiously leads to a much better plan. For fixing bugs it really helps to tell the model to check its assumptions, because that's often where it gets stuck and create new bugs while fixing others.

All in all, I think it's working for me. I'll tackle 2-3 day refactors in an afternoon. But obviously there's a learning curve and having the technical skills to know what you want will give you much better results.

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

#67

Post by stavros »

znsksjjs wrote: post #58
stavros wrote: post #8

Yes, agentic coding works and has massive value. No, you can't just deploy code unreviewed. Still takes much less time for me to review the plan and output than write the code myself.

> much less time for me to review the plan and output So typing was a bottleneck for you? I’ve only found this true when I’m a novice in an area. Once I’m experienced, typing is an inconsequential amount of time. Understanding the theory of mind that composes the system is easily the largest time sink in my day to day.

I don't need to understand the theory of mind, I just tell it what to compose. Writing the actual lines after that takes longer than not writing them!

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

#68

Post by lukebechtel »

baal80spam wrote: post #28
lukebechtel wrote: post #19

1. Start with a plan. Get AI to help you make it, and edit. 2. Part of the plan should be automated tests. AI can make these for you too, but you should spot check for reasonable behavior. 3. Use Claude 4.5 Opus 4. Use Git, get the AI to check in its work in meaningful chunks, on its own git branch. 5. Ask the AI to keep am append-only developer log as a markdown file, and to update it whenever its state significantl…

> Use Claude 4.5 Opus In my org we are experimenting with agentic flows, and we've noticed that model choice matters especially for autonomy. GPT-5.2 performed much better for long-running tasks. It stayed focused, followed instructions, and completed work more reliably. Opus 4.5 tended to stop earlier and take shortcuts to hand control back sooner.

Interesting! Was kinda disappointed with Codex last time I tried it ~2m ago, but things change fast.

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

#70

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

WillAdams wrote: post #21
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #15

Since we are on this topic, how would I make an agent that does this job: I am writing an automation software that interfaces with a legacy windows CAD program. Depending on the automation, I just need a picture of the part. Sometimes I need part thickness. Sometimes I need to delete parts. Etc... Its very much interacting with the CAD system and checking the CAD file or output for desired results. I was considering…

What controls the legacy CAD app? Are you using AutoLISP? or VB scripting? Or something else?

I'm using VB.net with visual studio.
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