Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Agentic Engineering Patterns

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 341 posts

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#121

Post by jmalicki »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #114
jmalicki wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here is an example where the prompt was only a few hundred tokens and the output reasoning chain was correct, but the actual function call was wrong https://x.com/xundecidability/status/2005647216741105962?s=2...

I as a human have typos too - and sometimes they're the hardest thing to catch in code review because you know what you meant.

Hopefully there is some of lint process to catch my human hallucinations and typos.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#122

Post by ryanthedev »

flir wrote: post #117
lbreakjai wrote: post #109

We're going to do it again, aren't we? We're going to take something simple and sensible ("write tests first", "small composable modules", etc.), give it a fancy complicated name ("Behavior-Constrained Implementation Lifecycle pattern", "Boundary-Scoped Processing Constructs pattern", etc.), and create an entire industry of consultants and experts selling books and enterprise coaching around it, each swearing they ha…

Has anyone staked a claim to "Agile AI" yet?

You haven’t heard of spec driven development?!? Haha.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#123

Post by joelthelion »

flir wrote: post #117
lbreakjai wrote: post #109

We're going to do it again, aren't we? We're going to take something simple and sensible ("write tests first", "small composable modules", etc.), give it a fancy complicated name ("Behavior-Constrained Implementation Lifecycle pattern", "Boundary-Scoped Processing Constructs pattern", etc.), and create an entire industry of consultants and experts selling books and enterprise coaching around it, each swearing they ha…

Has anyone staked a claim to "Agile AI" yet?

I've seen several already. There's a huge business opportunity (at our expense, of course).

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#125

Post by xXSLAYERXx »

offbynull wrote: post #71
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…

This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria. Engineering is the practical application of science and mathematics to solve problems. It sounds like you're maybe describing construction management instead. I'm not denying that there's value here, but what you're espousing seems divorced from reality. Good luck vibecoding a nontrivial act…

> This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.

Thats a little harsh. I think most everyone would agree we're in a transformative time for engineering. Sure theres hype, but the adoption in our profession (assuming you're an engineer) isn't waning.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#126

Post by storus »

These lessons get obliterated with every new LLM generation. Like how LangChain started on stupid models with small context, creating some crazy architecture around it to bypass their limitations that got completely obliterated when GPT-3.5 was released, yet people still use it and overcomplicate things. Rather look at where the puck is going, we might soon not need more than a single agent to do everything given context size keeps increasing, agent can use more tools and we might get some in-call context cleanup at some point as well that would allow an agent to spin forever instead of calling subagents due to context size limitations.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#127

Post by Juminuvi »

Very much agree with the idea of red/green TDD and have seen really good results during agentic coding. I've found adding a linting step in between increases efficiency as well and fails a bit faster. So it becomes..

Test fail -> implement -> linter -> test pass

Another idea I've thought about using is docs driven development. So the instructions might look like..

Write doc for feat/bug > test fail > implement > lint > test pass

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#128

Post by bavell »

simonw wrote: post #98
sdevonoes wrote: post #18

Is there anything about reviewing the generated code? Not by the author but by another human being. Colleagues don’t usually like to review AI generated code. If they use AI to review code, then that misses the point of doing the review. If they do the review manually (the old way) it becomes a bottleneck (we are faster at producing code now than we are at reviewing it)

This chapter describes a technique for making code reviews less mentally burdensome: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern... I'm hoping to add more on that topic as I discover other patterns that are useful there.

Asking for a walkthrough of the codebase? Sure you linked to the right page?

I was expecting tips on code review instead based on your comment and GP.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#129

Post by storus »

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…

I delegate to agents what I hate doing, e.g. when creating a SaaS web app, the last thing I want to waste my time on is the landing page with about/pricing/login and Stripe integration frontend/backend - I'll just tell Claude Code (with Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8 running locally on RTX Pro 6000) to make all this basic stuff for me so that I can focus on the actual core of the app. It then churns for half an hour, spews out the first version where I need to spend another half an hour to fix bugs by pointing errors to Claude Code and then in 1 hour it's all done. I can also tell it to avoid all the node.js garbage and do it all in plain HTML/JS/CSS.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#130

Post by simonw »

storus wrote: post #126

These lessons get obliterated with every new LLM generation. Like how LangChain started on stupid models with small context, creating some crazy architecture around it to bypass their limitations that got completely obliterated when GPT-3.5 was released, yet people still use it and overcomplicate things. Rather look at where the puck is going, we might soon not need more than a single agent to do everything given con…

I'm trying to include patterns that work independently of model releases.

It's tricky though. Take "red/green TDD" for example - it's perfectly possible that models will start defaulting to doing that anyway pretty soon.

In that case it's only three words so it doesn't feel hugely wasteful if it turns out not to be necessary - and there's still value in understanding what it means even if you no longer have to explicitly tell the agents to do it.

Post reply on HN