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The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

nibzard.com

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Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#91

Post by walt_grata »

torben-friis wrote: post #84
galaxyLogic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one could say that since it's AI, AI should be able to tell us what we're doing wrong. No? AI is supposed to make our work easier.

What you are doing wrong in respect to what? If you ask for A, how would any system know that you actually wanted to ask for B?

Honestly IMO it's more that I ask for A, but don't strongly enough discourage B then I get both A, B and maybe C, generally implemented poorly. The base systems need to have more focus and doubt built in before they'll be truely useful for things aside from a greenfield apps or generating maintainable code.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#92

Post by dist-epoch »

neumann wrote: post #78
torben-friis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not particularly proAI but I struggle with the mentality some engineers seem to apply to trying. If you read someone say “I don’t know what’s the big deal with vim, I ran it and pressed some keys and it didn’t write text at all” they’d be mocked for it. But with these tools there seems to be an attitude of “if I don’t get results straight away it’s bad”. Why the difference?

I agree to a degree, but I am in that camp. I subscribe to alphasignal, and every morning there are 3 new agent tools, and two new features, and a new agentic approach, and I am left wondering, where is the production stuff?

So just like in the JavaScript world?

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#93

Post by vidarh »

cobolexpert wrote: post #59
epolanski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ah do you mean sub-agents? I do understand that if I summon a sub-agent and give it e.g. code reviewing instructions, it will not fill up the context of the main conversation. But my point is that giving the sub-agent the instruction "review this code as if you were a staff engineer" (literally those words) should cover most use cases (but I can't prove this, unfortunately).

I do think you're right that you should be cautious about writing too convoluted sub-agents.

I'd rather use more of them that are brief and specialized, than try to over-correct on having a single agent try to "remember" too many rules. Not really because the description itself will eat too much context, but because having the sub-agent work for too long will accumulate too much context and dilute your initial instructions anyway.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#94

Post by embedding-shape »

mellosouls wrote: post #86

Not wanting to be a gatekeeper, but the author appears to be a "AI Growth Innovator" or some-such-I-don't-know-what rather than an actual engineer who has been ramping up on AI use to see what works in production: https://www.nibzard.com/about Scaled GitHub stars to 20,000+ Built engaged communities across platforms (2.8K X, 5.4K LinkedIn, 700+ YouTube) etc, etc. No doubt impressive to marketing types but maybe a pin…

That's so trite, what makes people write such sentences and not feel embarrassed? I remember when bragging so callously about arbitrary stuff would make you seem off-putting, what happened with that? Today it seems like everyone is bragging about what they do more than actually doing, and others seem fine with this, just part of "the hustle", where did we go wrong?

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#95

Post by alkonaut »

torben-friis wrote: post #60
prettygood wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not particularly proAI but I struggle with the mentality some engineers seem to apply to trying. If you read someone say “I don’t know what’s the big deal with vim, I ran it and pressed some keys and it didn’t write text at all” they’d be mocked for it. But with these tools there seems to be an attitude of “if I don’t get results straight away it’s bad”. Why the difference?

I don't understand how to get even bad results. Or any results at all. I'm at a level where I'm going "This can't just be me not having read the manual".

I get the same change applied multiple times, the agent having some absurd method of applying changes that conflict with what I say it like some git merge from hell and so on. I can't get it to understand even the simplest of contexts etc.

It's not really that the code it writes might not work. I just can't get past the actual tool use. In fact, I don't think I'm even at the stage where the AI output is even the problem yet.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#96

Post by vidarh »

franze wrote: post #52
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 am on the other side, I have given the complete control of my computer to Claude Code - Yolo Mode. Sudo. It just works. My servers run the same. I SSH into Claude Code there and let them do whatever work they need to do. So my 2 cents. Use Claude Code. In Yolo mode. Use it. Learn with it. Whenever I post something like this I get a lot of downvots. But well ... end of 2026 we will not use computer the way we use th…

> end of 2026 we will not use computer the way we use them now.

I think it will take much longer than that for most people, but I disagree with the timeline, not where we're headed.

I have a project now where the entirety of the project fall into these categories:

- A small server that is geared towards making it easy to navigate the reports the agents produce. This server is 100% written by Claude Code - I have not even looked at it, nor do I have any interest in looking at it as it's throwaway.

- Agent definitions.

- Scripts written by the agents for the agents, to automate away the parts where we (well, the agents mostly) have found a part of the task is mechanical enough to either take Claude out of the loop entirely, or produce a script that does the mechanical part interspersed with claude --print for smaller subtasks (and then systematically try to see if sonnet or haiku can handle the tasks). Eventually I may get to a point of starting to optimise it to use API's for smaller, faster models where they can handle the tasks well enough.

The goal is for an increasing proportion of the project to migrate from the second part (agent definitions) to the third part, and we do that in "production" workflows (these aren't user facing per se, but third parties do see the outputs).

That is, I started with a totally manual task I was carrying out anyway, defined agents to take over part of the process and produce intermediate reports, had it write the UI that lets me monitor the agents progress, then progressively I'd ask the agent after each step to turn any manual intervention into agents, commands, and skills, and to write tools to handle the mechanical functions we identified.

For each iteration, more stuff first went into the agent definitions, and then as I had less manual work to do, some of that time has gone into talking to the agent about which sub-tasks we can turn into scripts.

I see myself doing this more and more, and often "claude" is now the very first command I run when I start a new project whether it is code related or not.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#97

Post by alkonaut »

embedding-shape wrote: post #26
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 never had any luck integrating agents What exactly do you mean with "integrating agents" and what did you try? The simplest (and what I do) is not "integrating them" anywhere, but just replace the "copy-paste code + write prompt + copy output to code" with "write prompt > agent reads code > agent changes code > I review and accept/reject". Not really "integration" as much as just a workflow change.

I installed the copilot extension in my IDE, and switched on Agent mode.

I don't really get how the workflow is supposed to work, but I think it's mostly due to how the tool is made. It has like some sort of "change stack" similar to git commits/staging but which keeps conflicting with anything I manually edit.

Perhaps it's just this particular implementation (Copilot integration in VS) which is bad, and others are better? I have extreme trouble trying to feed it context, handling suggested AI changes without completely corrupting the code for even small changes.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#98

Post by alkonaut »

breppp wrote: post #63
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 also sympathize with that approach, and found it sometimes better than agents. I believe some of the agentic IDEs are missing a "contained mode". Let me select lines in my code which you are allowed to edit in this prompt and nothing else, for these "add a function that does x" without starting to run amok

Yes. And some way of using an instructions file. Because interacting with an agent in a tiny plugin window without use of "agents.md" or some sort of persistent prompt you can adjust retry etc is horrible.

Now it's "please add one unit test for Foobar()" and it goes away and thinks for 2 minues and does nothing then I point it to where the FooBar() which it didn't find and then adds a test method then I change the name to one I like better but now the AI change wasn't "accepted"(?) so the thing is borked...

I think the UX for agents is important and ...this can't be it.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#99

Post by Bewelge »

CurleighBraces wrote: post #28
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…

Yeah if you've not used codex/agent tooling yet it's a paradigm shift in the way of working, and once you get it it's very very difficult to go back to the copy-pasta technique. There's obviously a whole heap of hype to cut through here, but there is real value to be had. For example yesterday I had a bug where my embedded device was hard crashing when I called reset. We narrowed it down to the tool we used to flash…

- We narrowed it down to the tool we used to flash the code.

- I downloaded the repository, jumped into codex, explained the symptoms and it found and fixed the bug in less than ten minutes.

Change the second step to: - I downloaded the repository, explained the symptoms, copied the relevant files into Claude Web and 10 minutes later it had provided me with the solution to the bug.

Now I definitely see the ergonomic improvement of Claude running directly in your directory, saving you copy/paste twice. But in my experience the hard parts are explaining the symptoms and deciding what goes into the context.

And let's face it, in both scenarios you fixed a bug in 10-15 minutes which might have taken you a whole hour/day/week before. It's safe to say that LLMs are an incredible technological advancement. But the discussion about tooling feels like vim vs emacs vs IDEs. Maybe you save a few minutes with one tool over the other, but that saving is often blown out of proportion. The speedup I gain from LLMs (on some tasks) is incredible. But it's certainly not due to the interface I use them in.

Also I do believe LLM/agent integrations in your IDE are the obvious future. But the current implementations still add enough friction that I don't use them as daily drivers.

Re: The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns

#100

Post by alkonaut »

photios wrote: post #56
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…

Copilot's agent mode is a disaster. Use better tools: try Claude Code or OpenCode (my favorite). It's a new ecosystem with its own (atrocious!) jargon that you need to learn. The good news is that it's not hard to do so. It's not as complex or revolutionary as everyone makes it look like. Everything boils down to techniques and frameworks of collecting context/prompt before handing it over to the model.

Sadly we have some partnership meaning it's Copilot or nothing.
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