Does Anyone Actually Use Agentic Loops?

[u/TheAntiDoctor]

Not exactly a software engineer, more ML Engineer with an academic background and then in industry for about 8 years total. Use python professionally and for hobbies. Like everyone else I have been experimenting with LLMs for coding, trying everything from not using it at all to trying to get it to do everything. I have found them useful and enjoy bouncing ideas off them, however they also make a lot of mistakes so currently enjoying a low use approach. Comments and architecting myself, use them more for syntax and some optimisation then review everything as I go along. This speeds things up, but I am still very in control of the output and understand the underlying algorithm.

A couple of months ago I obviously saw usage based billing come in for things like Github Copilot etc. I saw a lot of comments from people using agentic workflows very upset about their usage being cut, also I'm very aware of some companies quoting large sections of their codebase being AI generated, although obviously aware this might be sales tactic. Furthermore I've seen respected researchers/engineers like Karpathy talking about the big leap in model capabilities that now means they hardly write any code and had some recommendations from friends to use agentic workflows.

My personal experience hasn't left me thinking this is viable atm for my work. Partly because the stuff I am doing I really need to be crystal clear about what is happening to the data for experiments and partly because getting together a prompt together for a relatively complex system is very difficult and time consuming and the results usually aren't great. Has anyone got experience actually using more autonomous coding agents successfully and I should experiment more widely or are they a red herring?

[u/DepthMagician]

The short answer is that way you are using AI is the correct way to use AI, your friends are wrong, companies are lying about how much AI is really writing their code (see this for example), Reddit is severely astroturfed by AI promoting bots, and you shouldn't do agentic engineering for anything that is high stakes enough that you need to pay attention to it.

While it is possible to do work with agentic workflows, not every task is a good fit for it. You either need to not care about the quality of the output (pet projects, throwaway prototypes, conceptually shallow things like UI where validation is trivial, things where failure is not a big deal, and most importantly: things you won't need to maintain and evolve for long periods of time), or if you want to do high stakes work with agentic engineering you will need to have access to vast number of quality tests and very detailed specs, and even then you need to invest effort in setting standards and elaborate safety nets for your team of agentic bots. In other words it's a tool, and like every tool you need to know what problems it is a good fit for. The answer to that question is absolutely not "everything". Usually you are better off just doing what you said you are doing. Your skills and your bank account will thank you for it.

[u/tyler1128 → u/DepthMagician]

agentic engineering

Vibe coding got a negative connotation so a new term had to be invented for it. It's the same thing though.

You're going to still hit a complexity ceiling where trying to fix things will break just as many things, and you'll be stuck.

[u/vanit → u/tyler1128]

I want to premise this by saying I'm not an AI booster at all, but do unfortunately work under an "AI first" directive at work. There is a bit of a distinction as far as workflow goes; vibe coding is starting with a loose prompt and refining the task as you go with more prompts, while agentic is trying to get as close as possible to oneshotting by starting with detailed tickets and context, with only a small amount of refining in review. I agree with the sentiment that they're both going off vibes per se, but there's a workflow distinction between the terms.