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

Not technically a nanny, but not dissimilar. In this case, they do several types of work (house cleaning, watching 1-3 kids, daytime and overnights, taking kids out.) They are very competent – by far the best we've found in 3 years – and charge different rates for the different types of work. We also need to track mileage etc. for reimbursement.

They had a spreadsheet for tracking but I found it moderately annoying – it was taking 5-10 minutes a week, so normally I wouldn't have bothered to write a different tool, but with vibe coding it was fairly trivial.

+1 for generating plans and then clearing context. I typically have a skill and an agent. I use the skill to generate an initial plan for an atomic unit of work, clear context and then use the agent to review said plan. Finally clear context and use the skill to implement the plan phase by phase, ensuring to review each phase for consistency with the next phase and the overall plan. I've had moderate success with this.

What do you mean you don’t need to understand? So what do you do when there’s a bug that an LLM can’t fix?

If your bottleneck is typing the code, you must be a junior programmer.

I use Augment with Claud Opus 4.5 every day at my job. I barely ever write code by hand anymore. I don't blindly accept the code that it writes, I iterate with it. We review code at my work. I have absolutely found a lot of benefit from my tools.

I've implemented several medium-scale projects that I anticipate would have taken 1-2 weeks manually, and took a day or so using agentic tools.

A few very concrete advantages I've found:

* I can spin up several agents in parallel and cycle between them. Reviewing the output of one while the others crank away.

* It's greatly improved my ability in languages I'm not expert in. For example, I wrote a Chrome extension which I've maintained for a decade or so. I'm quite weak in Javascript. I pointed Antigravity at it and gave it a very open-ended prompt (basically, "improve this extension") and in about five minutes in vastly improved the quality of the extension (better UI, performance, removed dependencies). The improvements may have been easy for someone expert in JS, but I'm not.

Here's the approach I follow that works pretty well:

1. Tell the agent your spec, as clearly as possible. Tell the agent to analyze the code and make a plan based on your spec. Tell the agent to not make any changes without consulting you.

2. Iterate on the plan with the agent until you think it's a good idea.

3. Have the agent implement your plan step by step. Tell the agent to pause and get your input between each step.

4. Between each step, look at what the agent did and tell it to make any corrections or modifications to the plan you notice. (I find that it helps to remind them what the overall plan is because sometimes they forget...).

5. Once the code is completed (or even between each step), I like to run a code-cleanup subagent that maintains the logic but improves style (factors out magic constants, helper functions, etc.)

This works quite well for me. Since these are text-based interfaces, I find that clarity of prose makes a big difference. Being very careful and explicit about the spec you provide to the agent is crucial.

You fundamentally misunderstand AI assisted coding if you think it does the work for you, or that it gets it right, or that it can be trusted to complete a job.

It is an assistant not a team mate.

If you think that getting it wrong, or bugs, or misunderstandings, or lost code, or misdirections, are AI "failing", then yes you will fail to understand or see the value.

The point is that a good AI assisted developer steers through these things and has the skill to make great software from the chaotic ingredients that AI brings to the table.

And this is why articles like this one "just don't get it", because they are expecting the AI to do their job for them and holding it to the standards of a team mate. It does not work that way.