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Agentic Engineering Patterns

simonwillison.net

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Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#91

Post by JetSetIlly »

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've heard people say that these coding agents are just tools and don't replace the thinking. That's fine but the problem for me is that the act of coding is when I do my thinking!

I'm thinking about how to solve the problem and how to express it in the programming language such that it is easy to maintain. Getting someone/something else to do that doesn't help me.

But different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#93

Post by mpalmer »

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's not pleasant to read this.

    The claim here is profound: comprehension of the codebase at the function level is no longer necessary
It's not profound. It's not profound when I read the exact same awed blog post about how "agentic" is the future and you don't even need to know code anymore.

It wasn't profound the first time, and it's even dumber that people keep repeating it - maybe they take all the time they saved not writing, and use it to not read.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#94

Post by duskdozer »

paganel wrote: post #61
abm53 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rebuttal to this would be that you can do many such tasks in parallel. I’m not sure it’s really true in practice yet, but that would certainly be the claim.

But can you mentally "keep hold" (for lack of a better term) of those tasks that are getting executed in parallel? Honestly asking. Because, after they're done/have finished executing, I guess you still have to "check" their output, integrate their results into the bigger project they're (supposedly) part of etc, and for me the context-switching required to do all that is mentally taxing. But maybe this only happens…

I think the difference is that you're applying a standard of correctness or personal understanding of the code you're pushing that is being relaxed in the "agentic workflows"

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#95

Post by simonw »

sidcool wrote: post #63

PSA: This is sponsored by Augment code.

Only until March 6th, I'm selling site-wide sponsorship a week at a time. Those sponsors get no influence over what I write about at all - I started this entire guide without even mentioning it to them.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#96

Post by lvl155 »

People come up with the most insane workflow for agents. They complete about 80% of the work but that last 20% is basically equivalent to you doing the whole thing piece wise (with the help of AI). Except the latter gives you peace of mind.

I am still not sold on agentic coding. We’ll probably get there within the next couple of years.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#97

Post by edgyquant »

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…

I thought this too and then I discovered plan mode. If you just prompt agent mode it will be terrible, but coming up with a plan first has really made a big difference and I rarely write code at all now

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#98

Post by simonw »

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.

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#99

Post by maccard »

fragmede wrote: post #87
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…

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?

> At this point though, after Claude C Compiler,

Perfect example. You mean the C compiler that literally failed to compile a hello world [0] (which was given in it's readme)?

> What do you consider simple issues?

Hallucinating APIs for well documented libraries/interfaces, ignoring explicit instructions for how to do things, and making very simple logic errors in 30-100 line scripts.

As an example, I asked Claude code to help me with a Roblox game last weekend, and specifically asked it to "create a shop GUI for which scales with the UI, and opens when you press E next to the character". It proceeded to create a GUI with absolute sizings, get stuck on an API hallucination for handling input, and also, when I got it unstuck, it didn't actually work.

[0] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1

Re: Agentic Engineering Patterns

#100

Post by sarchertech »

fragmede wrote: post #87
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…

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?

Claude C compiler is 100k LOC that doesn’t do anything useful, and cost $20k plus the cost of an expert engineer creating a custom harness and babysitting it.

But the most important thing is that they were reverse engineering gcc by using it as an oracle. And it had gcc and thousands of other c compilers in its training set.

So if you are a large corporation looking to copy GPL code so that you can use it without worrying about the license, and the project you want to copy is a text transformer with a rigorously defined set of inputs and outputs, have at it.

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