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

1. give it toy assignment which is a simplified subcomponent of your actual task

2. wait

3. post on LinkedIn about how amazing AI now is

4. throw away the slop and write proper code

5. go home, to repeat this again tomorrow

I would think this is reasonable. My general understanding at Amazon is that things are expected to work via API boundaries (not quite the case at Google).

For me its a major change for personal projects. That said, since about 3 months ago VS Code Github Copilot is remarkably stable in working with existing code base and I could implement changes to those projects that would have taken me a substantially longer time. So at least for this use-case its there. Hidden game changers are Gradio/Streamlit for easy UI.

As far as I can tell, there are exactly 3 use cases that have demonstrably worked with AI, in the sense that their stakeholders (not the AI companies, the users) swear it works.

1. training a RAG on support questions for chat or documentation, w/good material

2. people doing GTM work in marketing, for things like email automation

3. people using a combination of expensive tools - Claude + Cursor + something else (maybe n8n, maybe a custom coding service) - to make greenfield apps

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Ad nauseam.

AI has made it possible for me to build several one-off personal tools in the matter of a couple of hours and has improved my non-tech life as a result. Before, I wouldn't even have considered such small projects because of the effort needed. It's been relieving not to have to even look at code, assuming you can describe your needs in a good prompt. On the other hand, I've seen vibe coded codebases with excessive layers of abstraction and performance issues that came from a possibly lax engineering culture of not doing enough design work upfront before jumping into implementation. It's a classic mistake, that is amplified by AI.

Yes, average code itself has become cheap, but good code still costs, and amazing code, well, you might still have an edge there for now, but eventually, accept that you will have to move up the abstraction stack to remain valuable when pitted against an AI.

What does this mean? Focus on core software engineering principles, design patterns, and understanding what computer is doing at a low level. Just because you're writing TypeScript doesn't mean you shouldn't know what's happening at the CPU level.

I predict the rise in AI slop cleanup consultancies, but they'll be competing with smarter AIs who will clean up after themselves.