Ask HN: How do people use coding agents?

1 points0-bad-sectors17d ago2 comments

I feel like I am doing something wrong with all the success stories I am reading. I followed the different workflows I have seen here like creating a detailed plans and writing extensive prompts and guardrails. Tried using instructions and skills yet I never get a satisfactory results at least in existing code bases.

The other day I needed to implement a feature that already had very detailed instructions and planning yet the agent gave me very low quality code riddled with naive mistakes. As I knew what should be done I discarded all the changes proposed by the agent and wrote the entire thing with the help of autocomplete in VSCode which was incredible as long as write a meaningful function names and comments it and managed to finish the entire feature in one day thanks to that and I believe that was much cheaper than all my failed attempts at agentic coding.

How do you guys yield good results from Claude Code and the likes of it?

2 comments

phoughton17d ago

I find describing the problem often works well, as opposed specifying a solution / change. And if it has a means to validate it's results then its significantly better as well.

So maybe describe the problem and work first on a means to detect errors, second - then let it rip.

saltyoldman17d ago

It is really good at refactors. Saying things like "deprecate the following configuration keys" and replace them with the concept of ... Even in a codebase with over 1000 files, it just works.

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