Software Engineering in the Agentic Era

Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bigcat12345678•about 2 hours ago

A few nits:

1. Writing code is cheap now

Change to "generating code is cheap", reserve "writing" for the manually written code for the pre-AI era. I think this is a good wording separation.

2. Agentic Engineering Patterns

I must ask to add at least a chapter to be read by agent. I.e., patterns just to tell agents how human might be working when working with them. Without this, I believe the book's content will be less relevant in 3 months, but with that, it feels a agentic-native book to me. (this is not try to be cute, we have to write for agents now)

stein1946•about 2 hours ago

I kinda feel that this person makes a lot of noise in this website. Can we rate limit them a bit?

argee•about 1 hour ago

> I kinda feel that this person makes a lot of noise in this website.

This person pretty much lives on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw

Personally I do think that people with huge amounts of karma contribute to a bit of a groupthink atmosphere, but Hacker News is set up to be more in their favor (which I think makes sense, to get a lot of karma they've been around a while and also understand what gets upvoted around here).

> Can we rate limit them a bit?

This submission was not made by simonw themselves, so I'm not sure what the ask is here. I think people ought to be submit to post whatever websites they want? It would be interesting to block simonw's own votes from influencing simonwillison.net submissions, but that would be hard to impose fairly across all webmasters.

goeric•about 2 hours ago

Simon, if you're reading this, I'm a huge fan of so much of your work! Rodney CLI has been a game changer for local development. I have a few open PRs that I've contributed but it doesn't look active. Are you planning on maintaining it or should I fork it?

baron3dl•about 2 hours ago

summon Simon with a hand drawn SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

pianopatrick•about 2 hours ago

one theory I am thinking through is that people say AI is good at greenfield and has a harder time editing code in a legacy code base.

So maybe you just treat projects as greenfield instead of editing.

Like if you want to make changes to a page you generate a new version of the page instead of editing the old one in place.

Then you keep the old version as fallback if problems come up with the new version.

Software Engineering in the Agentic Era

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Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews