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The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

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Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#41

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

You should definitely read the whole thing, but tl;dr

  - Generate a stable sequence of steps (a plan), then carry it out. Prevents malicious or unintended tool actions from altering the strategy mid-execution and improves reliability on complex tasks.
  - Provide a clear goal and toolset. Let the agent determine the orchestration. Increases flexibility and scalability of autonomous workflows.
  - Have the agent generate, self-critique, and refine results until a quality threshold is met.
  - Provide mechanisms to interrupt and redirect the agent’s process before wasted effort or errors escalate. Effective systems blend agent autonomy with human oversight. Agents should signal confidence and make reasoning visible; humans should intervene or hand off control fluidly.
If you've ever heard of "continuous improvement", now is the time to learn how that works, and hook that into your AI agents.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#42

Post by MrOrelliOReilly »

Kerrick wrote: post #11
MrOrelliOReilly wrote: post #4

This is a great consolidation of various techniques and patterns for agentic coding. It’s valuable just to standardize our vocabulary in this new world of AI led or assisted programming. I’ve seen a lot of developers all converging toward similar patterns. Having clear terms and definitions for various strategies can help a lot in articulating the best way to solve a given problem. Not so different from approaching a…

I recognized the need for this recently and started by documenting one [1]... then I dropped the ball because I, too, spent my winter holiday engrossed in agentic development. (Instead of documenting patterns.) I'm glad somebody kept writing! [1]: https://kerrick.blog/articles/2025/use-ai-to-stand-in-for-a-...

I will ruefully admit that I had also planned a similar blog post! I am hoping I can still add some value to the conversation, but it does seem like _everyone_ is writing about agentic development right now.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#43

Post by embedding-shape »

prettygood wrote: post #40
alkonaut wrote: post #20

All of this might as well be greek to me. I use ChatGPT and copy paste code snippets. Which was bleeding edge a year or two ago, and now it feels like banging rocks together when reading these types of articles. I never had any luck integrating agents, MCP, using tools etc. Like if I'm not ready to jump on some AI-spiced up special IDE, am I then going to just be left banging rocks together? It feels like some of the…

I'm so happy someone else says this, because I'm doing exactly the same. I tried to use agent mode in vs code and the output was still bad. You read simple things like: "We use it to write tests". I gave it a very simple repository, said to write tests, and the result wasn't usable at all. Really wonder if I'm doing it wrong.

You didn't actually just say "write tests" though right? What was the actual prompt you used?

I feel like that matters more than the tooling at this point.

I can't really understand letting LLMs decide what to test or not, they seem to completely miss the boat when it comes to testing. Half of them are useless because they duplicate what they test, and the other half doesn't test what they should be testing. So many shortcuts, and LLMs require A LOT of hand-holding when writing tests, more so than other code I'd wager.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#44

Post by vidarh »

cobolexpert wrote: post #37
hahahahhaah wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like just use claude code. That is it. Use it you get the feel for it. Everyone is over complicating. It is like learning to code itself. You need flight hours.

This is something that continues to surprise me. LLMs are extremely flexible and already come prepackaged with a lot of "knowledge", you don't need to dump hundreds of lines of text to explain to it what good software development practices are. I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.

You get to 80% there (numbers pulled out of the air) by just telling it to do things. You do need more to get from 80% there to 90%+ there.

How much more depends on what you're trying to do and in what language (e.g. "favourite" pet peeve: Claude occasionally likes to use instance_variable_get() in Ruby instead of adding accessors; it's a massive code smell), but there are some generic things, such as giving it instructions on keeping notes and giving them subagents to farm out repetitive tasks to prevent the individual task completion from filling up the context for tasks that are truly independent (in which case, for Claude Code at least, you can also tell it to do multiple in parallel)

But, indeed, just starting Claude Code (or Codex; I prefer Claude but it's a "personality thing" - try tools until you click with one) and telling it to do something is the most important step up from a chat window.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#46

Post by wesselbindt »

zuInnp wrote: post #38

Not only is the website layout horrible to read, it also smells like the article was written by AI. My brain just screams "no" when I try to read that.

Seems like a reasonable feeling to have. Anything that's not worth writing is not worth reading imo.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#47

Post by epolanski »

cobolexpert wrote: post #37
hahahahhaah wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like just use claude code. That is it. Use it you get the feel for it. Everyone is over complicating. It is like learning to code itself. You need flight hours.

This is something that continues to surprise me. LLMs are extremely flexible and already come prepackaged with a lot of "knowledge", you don't need to dump hundreds of lines of text to explain to it what good software development practices are. I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.

> I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.

That's exactly the point. Agents have their own context.

Thus, you try to leverage them by combining ad-hoc instructions for repetitive tasks (such as reviewing code or running a test checklist) and not polluting your conversation/context.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#48

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #5

I’d rather just read the prompt that this article was generated from.

That's like saying you'd rather listen to someone ask a question than read a chapter of a textbook.

About 99% of the blogs [written by humans] that reach HN's front page are fundamentally incorrect. It's mostly hot takes by confident neophytes. If it's AI-written, it actually comes close to factual. The thing you don't like is usually right, the thing you like is usually wrong. And that's fine if you'd rather read fiction. Just know what you're getting yourself into.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#49

Post by 63stack »

bluehat974 wrote: post #18

Agentic Patterns website https://agentic-patterns.com/ Github https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns

I can imagine all the middle managers are just salivating at the idea of presenting this webpage to higher ups as part of their "AI Strategy" at the next shareholder meeting.

Bullet point lists! Cool infographics! Foreign words in headings! 93 pages of problem statement -> solution! More bullet points as tradeoffs breakdown! UPDATED! NEW!

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#50

Post by epolanski »

_pdp_ wrote: post #22

If you are interested here is a list of actual agentic patterns - https://go.cbk.ai/patterns

You could also disclose you work there.

Because as soon as I started reading the patterns I realized this was bogus and one could only recommend this because of personal stakes.

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