Is there real evidence, beyond hype, that agentic coding produces net-positive results? If any of you have actually got it to work, could you share (in detail) how you did it?
By "getting it to work" I mean:\n * creating more value than technical debt, and\n * producing code that\u2019s structurally sound enough for someone responsible for the architecture to sign off on.
Lately I\u2019ve seen a push toward minimal or nonexistent code review, with the claim that we should move from \u201cvalidating architecture\u201d to \u201cvalidating behavior.\u201d In practice, this seems to mean: don\u2019t look at the code; if tests and CI pass, ship it. I can\u2019t see how this holds up long-term. My expectation is that you end up with "spaghetti" code that works on the happy path but accumulates subtle, hard-to-debug failures over time.
When I tried using Codex on my existing codebases, with or without guardrails, half of my time went into fixing the subtle mistakes it made or the duplication it introduced.
Last weekend I tried building an iOS app for pet feeding reminders from scratch. I instructed Codex to research and propose an architectural blueprint for SwiftUI first. Then, I worked with it to write a spec describing what should be implemented and how.
The first implementation pass was surprisingly good, although it had a number of bugs. Things went downhill fast, however. I spent the rest of my weekend getting Codex to make things work, fix bugs without introducing new ones, and research best practices instead of making stuff up. Although I made it record new guidelines and guardrails as I found them, things didn't improve. In the end I just gave up.
I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["story","author_terabytest","story_46691243","ask_hn"],"author":"terabytest","children":[46691426,46691880,46692211,46692421,46692441,46692472,46692521,46692552,46692561,46692567,46692578,46692610,46692611,46692620,46692629,46692657,46692663,46692667,46692698,46692712,46692735,46692779,46692821,46692883,46692917,46692949,46692986,46693012,46693108,46693182,46693261,46693333,46693355,46693559,46693567,46693594,46694014,46695501,46697542,46698668,46699103,46699244,46699257,46699490,46699656,46699744,46700161,46700274,46700324,46700348,46700386,46700395,46700436,46700505,46700509,46700750,46700875,46700917,46701115,46701137,46701400,46701488,46701546,46701570,46701818,46701849,46701913,46701936,46701938,46701944,46701949,46701970,46701974,46701991,46701992,46702093,46702125,46702207,46702228,46702330,46702385,46702469,46702534,46702545,46702605,46702737,46702744,46702764,46702825,46702894,46702901,46702924,46702925,46702946,46702971,46703001,46703056,46703057,46703246,46703259,46703263,46703306,46703350,46703353,46703459,46703497,46703599,46703651,46703676,46703774,46703818,46703840,46703852,46703968,46704064,46704081,46704088,46704093,46704237,46704251,46704260,46704351,46704401,46704570,46704598,46704666,46704690,46704704,46704733,46705003,46705153,46705251,46705680,46705724,46705759,46705817,46706024,46706232,46706317,46706461,46706749,46706774,46706890,46707121,46707215,46707548,46707917,46708177,46708435,46709155,46709630,46709936,46711954,46711961,46711995,46712409,46712979,46713139,46713930,46715087,46715730,46716080,46716261,46716295,46717363,46718160,46719202,46719778,46721215,46721327,46722975,46724132,46728561,46732984,46736149,46745641,46754325],"created_at":"2026-01-20T12:45:57Z","created_at_i":1768913157,"num_comments":455,"objectID":"46691243","points":461,"story_id":46691243,"story_text":"I've been trying to get agentic coding to work, but the dissonance between what I'm seeing online and what I'm able to achieve is doing my head in.
Is there real evidence, beyond hype, that agentic coding produces net-positive results? If any of you have actually got it to work, could you share (in detail) how you did it?
By "getting it to work" I mean:\n * creating more value than technical debt, and\n * producing code that\u2019s structurally sound enough for someone responsible for the architecture to sign off on.
Lately I\u2019ve seen a push toward minimal or nonexistent code review, with the claim that we should move from \u201cvalidating architecture\u201d to \u201cvalidating behavior.\u201d In practice, this seems to mean: don\u2019t look at the code; if tests and CI pass, ship it. I can\u2019t see how this holds up long-term. My expectation is that you end up with "spaghetti" code that works on the happy path but accumulates subtle, hard-to-debug failures over time.
When I tried using Codex on my existing codebases, with or without guardrails, half of my time went into fixing the subtle mistakes it made or the duplication it introduced.
Last weekend I tried building an iOS app for pet feeding reminders from scratch. I instructed Codex to research and propose an architectural blueprint for SwiftUI first. Then, I worked with it to write a spec describing what should be implemented and how.
The first implementation pass was surprisingly good, although it had a number of bugs. Things went downhill fast, however. I spent the rest of my weekend getting Codex to make things work, fix bugs without introducing new ones, and research best practices instead of making stuff up. Although I made it record new guidelines and guardrails as I found them, things didn't improve. In the end I just gave up.
I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.","title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-07-27T16:00:36Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"trashb"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"> isn't this fair?
We are talking about hear say anecdotal evidence from some influential people in the industry. The people mentioned in the comment I responded to have influence to organize certain research. Some measurements (even if not ideal) can point to 20x vs 0.1x speedup differences at least.
I indicated that there is at least some research pointing that developers (experienced or not) often overestimate the gains of using AI. There are a lot of other things that may prompt people to say things regarding emergent industries, for example investments into the AI industry.
I am interested if the claims are real or perhaps overstated. Therefore I asked what kind of information this is based on. This is how science works compared to marketing claims. Hypothesis lead to experiments that result in measurements that lead to a conclusion.
But as of now I still didn't even get a link to the statements supposedly made by these influential developers, this is the rhetoric with a lot of claims around AI especially. And therefore I am still skeptical about such claims until I see some concrete evidence.
So I would say yes it is fair to ask if they measured their results to back up their claims, especially if they are influential developers."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_trashb","story_46691243"],"author":"trashb","comment_text":"> isn't this fair?
We are talking about hear say anecdotal evidence from some influential people in the industry. The people mentioned in the comment I responded to have influence to organize certain research. Some measurements (even if not ideal) can point to 20x vs 0.1x speedup differences at least.
I indicated that there is at least some research pointing that developers (experienced or not) often overestimate the gains of using AI. There are a lot of other things that may prompt people to say things regarding emergent industries, for example investments into the AI industry.
I am interested if the claims are real or perhaps overstated. Therefore I asked what kind of information this is based on. This is how science works compared to marketing claims. Hypothesis lead to experiments that result in measurements that lead to a conclusion.
But as of now I still didn't even get a link to the statements supposedly made by these influential developers, this is the rhetoric with a lot of claims around AI especially. And therefore I am still skeptical about such claims until I see some concrete evidence.
So I would say yes it is fair to ask if they measured their results to back up their claims, especially if they are influential developers.","created_at":"2026-02-04T13:43:58Z","created_at_i":1770212638,"objectID":"46885716","parent_id":46720960,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:31:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"trashb"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"It is entirely plausible that your colleague did have a significant speedup from using AI. But that may also be a one off overstated story (probably not as you respect his judgement as "senior dev").
I'm not saying they didn't get a speedup or you can't get a speedup. I'm just wondering how they determined that speedup and how reliable they are as a source for the statement "using AI will improve your performance".
As the other thread was discussing, it is a difficult thing to prove but some (debatable) measurement proves more then anecdotal stories. And I am trying to probe for some sources where these kind of statements are proven as I am a programmer continually judging the tools available to me.
And on the flip side there is at least some evidence that programmers often overstate/overestimate their speedup when using AI."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_trashb","story_46691243"],"author":"trashb","comment_text":"It is entirely plausible that your colleague did have a significant speedup from using AI. But that may also be a one off overstated story (probably not as you respect his judgement as "senior dev").
I'm not saying they didn't get a speedup or you can't get a speedup. I'm just wondering how they determined that speedup and how reliable they are as a source for the statement "using AI will improve your performance".
As the other thread was discussing, it is a difficult thing to prove but some (debatable) measurement proves more then anecdotal stories. And I am trying to probe for some sources where these kind of statements are proven as I am a programmer continually judging the tools available to me.
And on the flip side there is at least some evidence that programmers often overstate/overestimate their speedup when using AI.","created_at":"2026-02-04T13:26:08Z","created_at_i":1770211568,"objectID":"46885557","parent_id":46732041,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:31:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"spopejoy"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I had the thought of an AI-specific bytecode a while ago, but since then it's seemed a little silly -- the only langs that work well with agentic coding are the major ones with big open-source corpuses and SO/reddit discussions to train on.
I also saw something about a bytecode for prompts, which again seems to miss the point -- natural language is the win here.
What is kind of mysterious about the whole thing is that LLMs aren't compilers yet they grok code really well. It's always been a mystery to me that tools weren't smarter and then with LLMs the tooling became smarter than the compiler, and yet ... if it actually was a compiler we could choose to instruct it with code and get deterministic results. Something about the chaos is the very value they provide."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_spopejoy","story_46691243"],"author":"spopejoy","comment_text":"I had the thought of an AI-specific bytecode a while ago, but since then it's seemed a little silly -- the only langs that work well with agentic coding are the major ones with big open-source corpuses and SO/reddit discussions to train on.
I also saw something about a bytecode for prompts, which again seems to miss the point -- natural language is the win here.
What is kind of mysterious about the whole thing is that LLMs aren't compilers yet they grok code really well. It's always been a mystery to me that tools weren't smarter and then with LLMs the tooling became smarter than the compiler, and yet ... if it actually was a compiler we could choose to instruct it with code and get deterministic results. Something about the chaos is the very value they provide.","created_at":"2026-01-29T02:26:45Z","created_at_i":1769653605,"objectID":"46804950","parent_id":46717192,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:25:29Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"hahahahhaah"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Terraform is a great use case:
* Unrefactorable and highly boilerplatey
* Probably too big a job and low impact to rewrite as IaC
* AI can do all that tedious plumbing well
* Since result is a depoyment not executable code it suffices to check correct resources are created."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_hahahahhaah","story_46691243"],"author":"hahahahhaah","comment_text":"Terraform is a great use case:
* Unrefactorable and highly boilerplatey
* Probably too big a job and low impact to rewrite as IaC
* AI can do all that tedious plumbing well
* Since result is a depoyment not executable code it suffices to check correct resources are created.","created_at":"2026-01-26T02:53:21Z","created_at_i":1769396001,"objectID":"46761320","parent_id":46703350,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:25:44Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"logicallee"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I'm not sure if you're still reading comments, but in my experience the people who are elated at how well agents perform, versus your experience:
> but the dissonance between what I'm seeing online and what I'm able to achieve is doing my head in.
... could be due to your choice to use Codex, which is OpenAI's coding agent. The stellar reports you're reading online are mostly about Claude Code. (People say so.)
Try your next project in Claude code. I am on the Max plan, which includes Claude code at the flat rate, and have had just as good an experience as the online reports I've read."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_logicallee","story_46691243"],"author":"logicallee","comment_text":"I'm not sure if you're still reading comments, but in my experience the people who are elated at how well agents perform, versus your experience:
> but the dissonance between what I'm seeing online and what I'm able to achieve is doing my head in.
... could be due to your choice to use Codex, which is OpenAI's coding agent. The stellar reports you're reading online are mostly about Claude Code. (People say so.)
Try your next project in Claude code. I am on the Max plan, which includes Claude code at the flat rate, and have had just as good an experience as the online reports I've read.","created_at":"2026-01-25T14:28:54Z","created_at_i":1769351334,"objectID":"46754325","parent_id":46691243,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:25:19Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"benreesman"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"As with many things the secret sauce of AI-assisted software engineering is mathematics, skepticism, and hard work.
The first thing anyone should do is immediately understand that they are in a finite-sum adversarial relationship with all of their vendors. If you're getting repeatably and unambiguously food outcomes with Claude Code you're either in the bandit arm where high twitter follower count people go or you're counting cards in a twelve deck shoe and it'll be 24 soon. Switch to opencode today, the little thing in the corner is a clock, and a prominent clock is more or less proof you're not in a casino.
There is another key observation that took me a long time to internalize, which is that the loss surface of formalism is not convex: most of us have tried to lift the droids of of the untyped lambda calculus and into System F, and this does not as a general thing go well. But a droid in the untyped lambda calculus will with 100% likelihood eventually Superfund your codebase, no exceptions.
The droids are wildly "happy" for lack of a better term in CIC but the sweet spot is System F Omega. A web app that's not in Halogen is an unforced error now: pure vibecoders can do lastingly valuable work in PureScript, and they can't in React, which is irretrievably broken under any sane effects algebra.
So AI coding is kind of a mean reversion in a sense. Knuth and Lamport and Hoare and Djikstra had an LLM: it was an army of guys in short-sleeved dress shirts with half a page of fanfold system prompt on every page. That is automatable now, but there's a straightforward algorithm for remaining relevant: crank the ambition up until Opus 4.5 is whiffing.
Computer Scientist is still a high impact job. The cast of Office Space is redundant. But we kinda knew that the first time we saw Office Space.
Personally I'm working harder than ever on harder problems than ever with pretty extreme AI assist hygiene: you spend all your time on hard problems with serious impact. The bueden of understanding the code and being able to quit vim has gone up but down, and mathematics is absorbing computer programming.
The popular narrative about Claude Code 10x ing JavaScript projects is maskirovska"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_benreesman","story_46691243"],"author":"benreesman","comment_text":"As with many things the secret sauce of AI-assisted software engineering is mathematics, skepticism, and hard work.
The first thing anyone should do is immediately understand that they are in a finite-sum adversarial relationship with all of their vendors. If you're getting repeatably and unambiguously food outcomes with Claude Code you're either in the bandit arm where high twitter follower count people go or you're counting cards in a twelve deck shoe and it'll be 24 soon. Switch to opencode today, the little thing in the corner is a clock, and a prominent clock is more or less proof you're not in a casino.
There is another key observation that took me a long time to internalize, which is that the loss surface of formalism is not convex: most of us have tried to lift the droids of of the untyped lambda calculus and into System F, and this does not as a general thing go well. But a droid in the untyped lambda calculus will with 100% likelihood eventually Superfund your codebase, no exceptions.
The droids are wildly "happy" for lack of a better term in CIC but the sweet spot is System F Omega. A web app that's not in Halogen is an unforced error now: pure vibecoders can do lastingly valuable work in PureScript, and they can't in React, which is irretrievably broken under any sane effects algebra.
So AI coding is kind of a mean reversion in a sense. Knuth and Lamport and Hoare and Djikstra had an LLM: it was an army of guys in short-sleeved dress shirts with half a page of fanfold system prompt on every page. That is automatable now, but there's a straightforward algorithm for remaining relevant: crank the ambition up until Opus 4.5 is whiffing.
Computer Scientist is still a high impact job. The cast of Office Space is redundant. But we kinda knew that the first time we saw Office Space.
Personally I'm working harder than ever on harder problems than ever with pretty extreme AI assist hygiene: you spend all your time on hard problems with serious impact. The bueden of understanding the code and being able to quit vim has gone up but down, and mathematics is absorbing computer programming.
The popular narrative about Claude Code 10x ing JavaScript projects is maskirovska","created_at":"2026-01-24T17:37:30Z","created_at_i":1769276250,"objectID":"46745641","parent_id":46691243,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:48Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"iamsaitam"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Not that I know of, it just occurred to me while trying to be descriptive and succinct at the same time. English isn't my mother tongue."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_iamsaitam","story_46691243"],"author":"iamsaitam","comment_text":"Not that I know of, it just occurred to me while trying to be descriptive and succinct at the same time. English isn't my mother tongue.","created_at":"2026-01-24T12:06:42Z","created_at_i":1769256402,"objectID":"46742903","parent_id":46704212,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:38Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"replyifuagree"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":">I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.
Sadly review isn't enough. I just today I found some code that I reviewed 2 months where the developer clearly used an agent to generate the code and I completely missed some really dumb garbage the agent put in. The agent took a simple function that returns an object with some data and turned it into a mess that required multiple mocks in the tests (also generated by the agent).
The dev is a junior and a clear example of what is to come, inexperienced people thinking coding is getting an agent to get something to pass CI.
The tech debt is accelerating exponentially!"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_replyifuagree","story_46691243"],"author":"replyifuagree","comment_text":">I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.
Sadly review isn't enough. I just today I found some code that I reviewed 2 months where the developer clearly used an agent to generate the code and I completely missed some really dumb garbage the agent put in. The agent took a simple function that returns an object with some data and turned it into a mess that required multiple mocks in the tests (also generated by the agent).
The dev is a junior and a clear example of what is to come, inexperienced people thinking coding is getting an agent to get something to pass CI.
The tech debt is accelerating exponentially!","created_at":"2026-01-23T18:47:00Z","created_at_i":1769194020,"objectID":"46736149","parent_id":46691243,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:17Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"theshrike79"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Depends on so many things.\nLike the definition of \u201clarge\u201d and what you\u2019re asking the LLM to do and how the project is set up for LLM use.
It doesn\u2019t need to guess if it has the tools and documentation available."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_theshrike79","story_46691243"],"author":"theshrike79","comment_text":"Depends on so many things.\nLike the definition of \u201clarge\u201d and what you\u2019re asking the LLM to do and how the project is set up for LLM use.
It doesn\u2019t need to guess if it has the tools and documentation available.","created_at":"2026-01-23T17:58:38Z","created_at_i":1769191118,"objectID":"46735540","parent_id":46735322,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:14Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"martinosis"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"This is exactly where LLMS shines, but when you get to a larger project,for me everything falls apart since most of the time the application gets way to complex because the LLM try to guess what you want. This is ok for small project but quite bad for larger ones."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_martinosis","story_46691243"],"author":"martinosis","children":[46735540],"comment_text":"This is exactly where LLMS shines, but when you get to a larger project,for me everything falls apart since most of the time the application gets way to complex because the LLM try to guess what you want. This is ok for small project but quite bad for larger ones.","created_at":"2026-01-23T17:41:41Z","created_at_i":1769190101,"objectID":"46735322","parent_id":46704186,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:14Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"woooooo"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"The point of the story to me was, with a clear idea of what they want, the person got a year's worth of Big Tech done in a few hours with Claude. Could have been a couple days with a tight team, either way, the problem wasn't the coding ability or typing speed."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_woooooo","story_46691243"],"author":"woooooo","comment_text":"The point of the story to me was, with a clear idea of what they want, the person got a year's worth of Big Tech done in a few hours with Claude. Could have been a couple days with a tight team, either way, the problem wasn't the coding ability or typing speed.","created_at":"2026-01-23T16:10:50Z","created_at_i":1769184650,"objectID":"46734183","parent_id":46731207,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:10Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"tech_tuna"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same.
The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_tech_tuna","story_46691243"],"author":"tech_tuna","comment_text":"Yeah, exactly. There is no way Claude could do that much work in one hour, starting from scratch. You can even ask Claude if it could do that and it will say the same.
The LLM/AI tools are powerful and have a ton of use cases unlike technologies like crypto, but the hype train is running full steam and no one really knows where things will land over the next 5-10 years.","created_at":"2026-01-23T15:10:44Z","created_at_i":1769181044,"objectID":"46733419","parent_id":46699744,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:06Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"disgruntledphd2"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"> isn't really fair? Because not even you or I really know how to do so in a fair and reasonable manner, unless we start to involve trials with multiple developers and so on.
I think in a small conversation like this, it's probably not entirely fair.
However, we're hearing similar things from much larger organisations who definitely have the resources to do studies like this, and yet there's very little decent work available.
In fact, lots of the time they are deliberately misleading people (25% of our code generated by AI being copilot/other autocomplete). Like, that 25% stat was probably true historically with JetBrains products and using any form of code generations (for protobufs et al) so it's wildly deceptive et al."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_disgruntledphd2","story_46691243"],"author":"disgruntledphd2","comment_text":"> isn't really fair? Because not even you or I really know how to do so in a fair and reasonable manner, unless we start to involve trials with multiple developers and so on.
I think in a small conversation like this, it's probably not entirely fair.
However, we're hearing similar things from much larger organisations who definitely have the resources to do studies like this, and yet there's very little decent work available.
In fact, lots of the time they are deliberately misleading people (25% of our code generated by AI being copilot/other autocomplete). Like, that 25% stat was probably true historically with JetBrains products and using any form of code generations (for protobufs et al) so it's wildly deceptive et al.","created_at":"2026-01-23T14:57:20Z","created_at_i":1769180240,"objectID":"46733237","parent_id":46720960,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:06Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"X_use_teleport"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"I work in the business intelligence space and have had great success improving the speed, scope, and quality of my products with LLMs - and more so now with agentic copilots.
I think a critical point is how well one can communicate/delegate. I have a background with systems thinking and communication, so figuring out how to prompt for what I\u2019m after was smooth.
I was also an early adopter of LLMs so there\u2019s good muscle memory there.
It\u2019s important to see AI tools as accelerators - not replacements or solvers. Still do test-driven development. Still maintain robust documentation. Good practices + AI is where the value is; not just throwing AI at things."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_X_use_teleport","story_46691243"],"author":"X_use_teleport","comment_text":"I work in the business intelligence space and have had great success improving the speed, scope, and quality of my products with LLMs - and more so now with agentic copilots.
I think a critical point is how well one can communicate/delegate. I have a background with systems thinking and communication, so figuring out how to prompt for what I\u2019m after was smooth.
I was also an early adopter of LLMs so there\u2019s good muscle memory there.
It\u2019s important to see AI tools as accelerators - not replacements or solvers. Still do test-driven development. Still maintain robust documentation. Good practices + AI is where the value is; not just throwing AI at things.","created_at":"2026-01-23T14:36:47Z","created_at_i":1769179007,"objectID":"46732984","parent_id":46691243,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:03Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"edanm"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"> I wonder if they have measured their results?
This is a notoriously difficult thing to measure in a study. More relevantly though, IMO, it's not a small effect that might be difficult to notice - it's a huge, huge speedup.
How many developers have measured whether they are faster when programming in Python vs assembly? I doubt many have. And I doubt many have chosen Python over assembly because of any study that backs it up. But it's also not exactly a subtle difference - I'm fairly 99% of people will say that, in practice, it's obvious that Python is faster for programming than assembly.
I talked literally yesterday to a colleague who's a great senior dev, and he made a demo in an hour and a half that he says would've taken him two weeks to do without AI. This isn't a subtle, hard to measure difference. Of course this is in an area where AI coding shines (a new codebase for demo purposes) - but can we at least agree that in some things AI is clearly an order of magnitude speedup?"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_edanm","story_46691243"],"author":"edanm","children":[46885557],"comment_text":"> I wonder if they have measured their results?
This is a notoriously difficult thing to measure in a study. More relevantly though, IMO, it's not a small effect that might be difficult to notice - it's a huge, huge speedup.
How many developers have measured whether they are faster when programming in Python vs assembly? I doubt many have. And I doubt many have chosen Python over assembly because of any study that backs it up. But it's also not exactly a subtle difference - I'm fairly 99% of people will say that, in practice, it's obvious that Python is faster for programming than assembly.
I talked literally yesterday to a colleague who's a great senior dev, and he made a demo in an hour and a half that he says would've taken him two weeks to do without AI. This isn't a subtle, hard to measure difference. Of course this is in an area where AI coding shines (a new codebase for demo purposes) - but can we at least agree that in some things AI is clearly an order of magnitude speedup?","created_at":"2026-01-23T13:08:19Z","created_at_i":1769173699,"objectID":"46732041","parent_id":46703638,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:24:03Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"aban-m"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"The point is precisely this. How do you know you have used it to its full potential?\n"You're holding it wrong" has no limits."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_aban-m","story_46691243"],"author":"aban-m","comment_text":"The point is precisely this. How do you know you have used it to its full potential?\n"You're holding it wrong" has no limits.","created_at":"2026-01-23T11:44:11Z","created_at_i":1769168651,"objectID":"46731351","parent_id":46692856,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:23:59Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"keybored"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Dearest leadership not unblocking execution. What's that got to do with what we\u2019re complaining about? Did Claude cure cancer (this is hyperbole) in one hour or not?"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_keybored","story_46691243"],"author":"keybored","children":[46734183],"comment_text":"Dearest leadership not unblocking execution. What's that got to do with what we\u2019re complaining about? Did Claude cure cancer (this is hyperbole) in one hour or not?","created_at":"2026-01-23T11:25:41Z","created_at_i":1769167541,"objectID":"46731207","parent_id":46730259,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:23:59Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"woooooo"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"At big tech companies "were still finding alignment" is code for leadership not being able to make decisions and unblock execution."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_woooooo","story_46691243"],"author":"woooooo","children":[46731207],"comment_text":"At big tech companies "were still finding alignment" is code for leadership not being able to make decisions and unblock execution.","created_at":"2026-01-23T09:10:35Z","created_at_i":1769159435,"objectID":"46730259","parent_id":46723753,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:23:56Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"mountainriver"},"comment_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Same, Opus 4.5 is nothing short of amazing. I\u2019m really shocked to see so many posts claiming it doesn\u2019t work.
We write whole full scale Rust SaaS apps with few regressions.
I do novel machine learning research in about a 1/10 of the time it would have taken me.
A big thing is telling it to excessively log so it can see the execution"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_mountainriver","story_46691243"],"author":"mountainriver","comment_text":"Same, Opus 4.5 is nothing short of amazing. I\u2019m really shocked to see so many posts claiming it doesn\u2019t work.
We write whole full scale Rust SaaS apps with few regressions.
I do novel machine learning research in about a 1/10 of the time it would have taken me.
A big thing is telling it to excessively log so it can see the execution","created_at":"2026-01-23T05:08:15Z","created_at_i":1769144895,"objectID":"46728667","parent_id":46700274,"story_id":46691243,"story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:23:50Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":456,"nbPages":23,"page":0,"params":"tags=story_46691243&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":9,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":110,"roundTrip":22},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":1,"total":1},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":8,"total":9},"total":9},"total":9},"total":9},"query":"","serverTimeMS":121}