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Agentic Engineering Patterns

simonwillison.net

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Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#31

Post by jkhdigital »

birdfood wrote: post #14
benrutter wrote: post #10

I use AI in my workflow mostly for simple boilerplate, or to troubleshoot issues/docs. I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining). I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code a…

I was in the same boat as you until I saw DHH post about how he’s changed his use of agents. In his talk with Lex Fridman his approach was similar to mine and it really felt like a kernel of sanity amongst the hype. So when he said he’s changed his approach I had another look. I’m using agents (Claude code) every day now. I still write code every day too. (So does Dax Raad from OpenCode to throw a bit more weight beh…

I strongly agree with that last statement—I hate using agents because their code smells awful even if it works. But I have to use them now because otherwise I’m going to wake up one day and be 100% obsolete and never even notice how it happened.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#32

Post by hresvelgr »

yoaviram wrote: post #24

Yesterday I wrote a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering. Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse. The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything. https://nonstruc…

> It is much closer to proper engineering.

I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering.

The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#33

Post by Schlagbohrer »

CloakHQ wrote: post #29
mohsen1 wrote: post #6

I've experimented with agentic coding/engineering a lot recently. My observation is that software that is easily tested are perfect for this sort of agentic loop. In one of my experiments I had the simple goal of "making Linux binaries smaller to download using better compression" [1]. Compression is perfect for this. Easily validated (binary -> compress -> decompress -> binary) so each iteration should make a dent o…

[flagged]

What are you developing that technology for?

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#34

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

hresvelgr wrote: post #32
yoaviram wrote: post #24

Yesterday I wrote a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering. Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse. The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything. https://nonstruc…

> It is much closer to proper engineering. I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering. The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neit…

Indeed, it's like those complaining self-driving cars occasionally crash when their crash rates are up to 90% less than humans . . .

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#35

Post by fennecfoxy »

wokwokwok wrote: post #17

I really like the idea of agent coding patterns. This feels like it could be expanded easily with more content though. Off the top of my head: - tell the agent to write a plan, review the plan, tell the agent to implement the plan - allow the agent to “self discover” the test harness (eg. “Validate this c compiler against gcc”) - queue a bunch of tasks with // todo … and yolo “fix all the todo tasks” - validate again…

This sort of thing is available using utilities like spec kit/spec kitty/etc. But yes it does make it do better, including writing its own checklists so that it comes back to the tasks it identified early on without distraction.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#36

Post by vessenes »

sd9 wrote: post #30

I've recently got into red/greed TDD with claude code, and I have to agree that it seems like the right way to go. As my projects were growing in complexity and scope, I found myself worrying that we were building things that would subtly break other parts of the application. Because of the limited context windows, it was clear that after a certain size, Claude kind of stops understanding how the work you're doing in…

Red/green is especially good with claude because even now with opus 4.6, claude can throw out a little comment like “//Implementation on hold until X/Y/Z: return { true }” and proceed to completely skip implementation based on the inline skip comment for a longgg time. It used to do this aggressively even in the tests, but by and large red/green prompting helps immensely - it tells the agent “think of failing tests as SUCCESS right now” - then you’ll get lots of them.

I’ve always been partial to integration tests too. Hand coding made integration tests feel bad; you’re almost doubling the code output in some cases - especially if you end up needing to mock a bunch of servers. Nowadays that’s cheap, which is super helpful.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#37

Post by hollowturtle »

yoaviram wrote: post #24

Yesterday I wrote a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering. Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse. The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything. https://nonstruc…

We have the entire web built on technical debt and LLMs mostly trained on that, what could go wrong? Cost will reside somewhere else if not on code

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#38

Post by rsynnott »

lumpilumpi wrote: post #19
benrutter wrote: post #10

I use AI in my workflow mostly for simple boilerplate, or to troubleshoot issues/docs. I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining). I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code a…

My experience is that the first iteration output from a single agent is not what I want to be on the hook for. What squares it for me with "not writing code anymore" is the iterative process to improve outputs: 1) Having review loops between agents (spawn separate "reviewer" agents) and clear tests / eval criteria improved results quite a bit for me. 2) Reviewing manually and giving instructions for improvements is n…

Is that… actually faster than just doing it yourself, tho? Like, “I could write the right thing, or I could have this robot write the wrong thing and then nag it til it corrects itself” seems to suggest a fairly obvious choice.

I’ve yet to see these things do well on anything but trivial boilerplate.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#39

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

hresvelgr wrote: post #32
yoaviram wrote: post #24

Yesterday I wrote a post about exactly this. Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. It is much closer to proper engineering. Like an engineer overseeing the construction of a bridge, the job is not to lay bricks. It is to ensure the structure does not collapse. The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything. https://nonstruc…

> It is much closer to proper engineering. I would not equate software engineering to "proper" engineering insofar as being uttered in the same sentence as mechanical, chemical, or electrical engineering. The cost of code is collapsing because web development is not broadly rigorous, robust software was never a priority, and everyone knows it. The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neit…

> The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

I think the externalities are being ignored. Having time and money to train engineers is expensive. Having all the data of your users being stolen is a slap in the wrist.

So replacing those bad worekrs with AI is fine. Unless you remove the incentives to be fast instead of good, then yeah AI can be good enough for some cases.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#40

Post by sergiosgc »

maccard wrote: post #20
fnands wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you tried? I think trying agents to do larger tasks was always very hit or miss, up to about the end of last year. In the past couple of months I have found them to have gotten a lot better (and I'm not the only one). My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from: smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering

I’m not OP but every time I post a comment with this sentiment I get told “the latest models are what you need”. If every 3 months you are saying “it’s ready as long as you use the latest model”, then it wasn’t ready 3 months ago and it’s not likely to be ready now. To answer your question, I’ve tried both Claude code and Antigravity in the last 2 weeks and I’m still finding them struggling. AG with Gemini regularly…

Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec? Strangely, taking the time to lay out the steps in a large task helps immensely. It's the difference between the behavior you describe and just letting it run productively for segments of ten or fifteen minutes.
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