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Agentic Engineering Patterns

simonwillison.net

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Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#81

Post by sd9 »

dude250711 wrote: post #80
sd9 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally today I think it’s 3. Eventually I do think it will be 2. I think you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. Nobody knows how this is all going to play out, I just want to make sure I’m at the forefront of it.

So you think the tools will be intelligent yet somehow hard to master? And the progress is slowing down in such a way, that knowledge learned today will not be outdated anymore? Should investors be worried, since AGI is not coming anymore?

No, I think they will be very easy to use.

I think the relative comfort we've enjoyed as software engineers is going to disappear eventually. I just want to be the last to go.

My whole career, I've remained valuable by staying at the forefront of what is possible and connecting that to users' needs. Nothing has changed about my approach from that perspective.

I'm not an investor so I have no idea how they should think.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#82

Post by maccard »

sergiosgc wrote: post #40
maccard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Have you tried it with something like OpenSpec?

No. The parent comment said I needed a new model, which I've tried. Being told "just try something else aswell" kind of proves the point.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#84

Post by edelans »

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…

Agree. This is a transition from being "in" the loop to being "on" the loop.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#85

Post by maccard »

anon7000 wrote: post #47
maccard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor have marked the big shift for me. Before that, agentic development mostly made me want to just do it myself, because it was getting stuck or going on tangents. I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Everyone is different, and I’m sure models are better at different types of work (or styles of working), but it doesn’t take much to make it too frustrating…

> I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor.

Opus 4.6 has been out for less than a month. If it was a big shift surely we'd see a massive difference over 4.5 which was november. I think this proves the point, you're not seeing seisimic shifts every 3 months and you're not even clear about which model was the fix.

> I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly.

Shifting, maybe. But shuffling deck chairs every 3 months.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#86

Post by sothatsit »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #52
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…

One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are b…

> 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it

I think this is the main point where many people’s work differs. Most of my work I know roughly what needs changing and how things are structured but I jump between codebases often enough that I can’t always remember the exact classes/functions where changes are needed. But I can vaguely gesture at those specific changes that need to be made and have the AI find the places that need changing and then I can review the result.

I rarely get the luxury of working in a single codebase for a long enough period of time to get so familiar with it that I can jump to particular functions without much thought. That means AI is usually a better starting point than me fumbling around trying to find what I think exists but I don’t know where it is.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#87

Post by fragmede »

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…

At this point though, after Claude C Compiler, you've got to give us more details to better understand the dichotomy. What do you consider simple issues?

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#88

Post by irthomasthomas »

vidarh wrote: post #75
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are b…

Yes, it's often faster if you sit around waiting . What I will do instead is prompt the AI to create various plans, do other stuff while they do, review and approve the plans, do other stuff while multiple plans are being implemented , and then review and revise the output. And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it, but my time is…

I do this too, but then you need some method to handle it, because now you have to read and test and verify multiple work streams. It can become overwhelming. In the past week I had the following problems from parallel agents:

Gemini running an benchmark- everything ran smoothly for an hour. But on verification it had hallucinated the model used for judging, invalidating the whole run.

Another task used Opus and I manually specified the model to use. It still used the wrong model.

This type of hallucination has happened to me at least 4-5 times in the past fortnight using opus 4.6 and gemini-3.1-pro. GLM-5 does not seem to hallucinate so much.

So if you are not actively monitoring your agent and making the corrections, you need something else that is.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#89

Post by vidarh »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #88
vidarh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's often faster if you sit around waiting . What I will do instead is prompt the AI to create various plans, do other stuff while they do, review and approve the plans, do other stuff while multiple plans are being implemented , and then review and revise the output. And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it, but my time is…

I do this too, but then you need some method to handle it, because now you have to read and test and verify multiple work streams. It can become overwhelming. In the past week I had the following problems from parallel agents: Gemini running an benchmark- everything ran smoothly for an hour. But on verification it had hallucinated the model used for judging, invalidating the whole run. Another task used Opus and I ma…

You need a harness, yes, and you need quality gates the agent can't mess with, and that just kicks the work back with a stern message to fix the problems. Otherwise you're wasting your time reviewing incomplete work.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#90

Post by jmalicki »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #88
vidarh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's often faster if you sit around waiting . What I will do instead is prompt the AI to create various plans, do other stuff while they do, review and approve the plans, do other stuff while multiple plans are being implemented , and then review and revise the output. And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it, but my time is…

I do this too, but then you need some method to handle it, because now you have to read and test and verify multiple work streams. It can become overwhelming. In the past week I had the following problems from parallel agents: Gemini running an benchmark- everything ran smoothly for an hour. But on verification it had hallucinated the model used for judging, invalidating the whole run. Another task used Opus and I ma…

Glancing at what it's doing is part of your multitasking rounds.

Also instead of just prompting, having it write a quick summary of exactly what it will do where the AI writes a plan including class names branch names file locations specific tests etc. is helpful before I hit go, since the code outline is smaller and quicker to correct.

That takes more wall clock time per agent, but gets better results, so fewer redo steps.

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