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

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141–150 of 478 posts

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

#141
I've been using agentic coding tools for the past year and a half, and the pattern I've observed is that they work best when they're treated as a very fast, very knowledgeable junior developer, not completely as "autonomous engineer".

When I try to give agents broad architectural tasks, they flounder. When I constrain them to small, well-defined units of work within an existing architecture, they can produce clean, correct code surprisingly often.

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

#142

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 advantage…

[flagged]

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't choose the payment structure, and the point is that a CLI is not a high bar. Something that we used to spend ~10 minutes a week on with spreadsheets is now ~1 minute/week.

Why didn’t you work out a more manageable billing structure with them?! Or to put it another way: if it took you 10 minutes a week with spreadsheets to even figure out what their bill is, how on earth did they verify your invoices were even correct? And if they couldn’t—or if it took more than 10 minutes each week—why wouldn’t they prefer a billing system they could verify they were being paid correctly?

Jesus! is this HN or personal finance forum? Who cares why they do it a certain way. Did they ask for your advices?

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

#144
I've built multiple new apps with it and manage two projects that I wrote. I barely write any code other than frontend, copy, etc.

One is a VSCode extension and has thousands of downloads across different flavors of the IDE -- won't plug it here to spare the downvotes ;)

Been a developer professionally for nearly 20 years. It is 100% replacing most of the things I used to code.

I spend most of my time while it's working testing what it's built to decide on what's next. I also spend way more time on DX of my own setup, improving orchestration, figuring out best practice guidance for the Agent(s), and building reusable tools for my Agents (MCP).

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

#145
post #135

A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/200765974…

You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post). While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).

Why not in that case provide an example to rebut and contribute as opposed to knocking someone elses example even if it was against the use of agentic coding.

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

#146
post #13

I’ve heard coding agents best described as a fleet of junior developers available to you 24/7 and I think that’s about right. With the added downside that they don’t really learn as they go so they will forever be junior developers (until models get better). There are projects where throwing a dozen junior developers at the problem can work but they’re very basic CRUD type things.

Or you give them all specific little tasks that you think out. And then review their work of course. So yeah you are still needing to do a lot of work.

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

#147
post #127

Coding agent is a perfect simulation of a junior developer working under you. Developer that will tell you - “yes I can do that” about any language and any problem and will never ask you any questions trying very hard to appear competent. Your job is to put them in constraints and give granular and clear tasks. Be aware that junior developer has very basic knowledge about architecture. The good is that it does not si…

it also doesnt simulate the part where the junior actually learns and is less clueless 6 months from now, unfortunately

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

#148
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd say it is a success at being useful, but yeah it does seem like the code itself has been a bit of a mess.

I've used a version that had a bd stats and a bd status that both had almost the same content in slightly different formats. Later versions appear to have made them an alias for the same thing. I've also had a version where the daemon consistently failed to start and there were no symptoms other than every command taking 5 seconds. In general, the optimization with the daemon is a questionable choice. It doesn't really need to be _that_ fast.

And yet, even after all of that it still has managed to be useful and generally fairly reliable.

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

#149
post #135

A principal engineer at Google posted on Twitter that Claude Code did in an hour what the team couldn’t do in a year. Two days later, after people freaked out, context was added. The team built multiple versions in that year, each had its trade offs. All that context was given to the AI and it was able to produce a “toy” version. I can only assume it had similar trade offs. https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/200765974…

You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post). While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).

Citation needed. Talk, especially in the 'agentic age', is cheap.

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

#150

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 (may…

A $200/month Cursor plan spent on Opus 4.5 calls is not expensive compared to the silly amount of work it will do if you make proper use of plan/agent/debug cycles.
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