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Ask HN: Is anybody producing good code with coding agents?

2 points by ruffrey ↗ HN
This is a genuine problem that I hear from senior engineers. I'm looking for a solution.

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The quality of ai-generated code is <censored> (claude, agy, copilot, codex a little better).

It's exhausting to read.

I used to love learning from my experienced colleagues and taking pride in what we made. We spent time on elegance and craftsmanship.

Now I spend nearly the whole workday slogging through convoluted code riddled with footguns. I ride on hopes and dreams I might understand a changeset.

It takes 5x longer to review Claude merge requests and I barely understand what I approve.

Each day I drift further from understanding as I shovel the same <censored> into the codebase.

The solution seems to be, reach "level 4 autonomy" and don't read or write code anymore.

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WHO HAS SOLVED THIS PROBLEM? PLEASE HELP!

67 comments

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verdverm
I'm really happy with my opencode + open weight setup, the code is generally pretty good, but I do spend tokens having agents go look for common ai slop patterns.

It's heavily customized, replaced most internal systems via plugins, a set of custom agent instead of builtin ones, different model families for different sub tasks. (don't have claude review its own code)

I'm working on polishing them up and porting a few more from my own harness, then will be open sourcing. Keep your eye out for a "better-opencode" plugin suite, I'll be sure to share it with HN :]

In the near-term, I really like GLM 5.3 prose for code explore / review, give it a shot, it's cheaper (flash model) and catches all sorts of mistakes from the Big Ai models. We fully rolled out our custom pr-review on glm-5.3-flash last week. Most devs are still on claude, moving them towards fireworks and opencode.

OpenCode Go is a great way to try out open weight models for $10/month

drewg123
Its a spectrum. For ai-maintained code (like a gui to visualize performance data), IDGAF what the code looks like. I just let claude or codex go nuts and 100% vibe code.

For code I care about, I audit every single hunk as its produced. I give it extensive style guidelines, and crack down on things like a 20-line essay in a comment.

For mission critical code, I write the code myself and have an agent review it.

drgo
The way I have been doing it is to use LLMs to generate the code that I don't want to write: prototypes, tests, benchmarks, isolated,straightforward almost copy-paste code. I still write my own code as before because I enjoy doing that and because trying to understand and fix what an LLM generates and regenerates is harder and more tedious and time consuming than writing the code the way I want to do it in the first place.
tmarice
After vibing myself into a corner multiple times on important projects, I now have only two modes: clankermaxx for code I don't really care about (mostly frontend react), and write by hand everything else. Using Django for backend already removes the most of the cruft, and writing by hand also means I actually understand what's going on. Works fine for now.

I'm still on the fence for tests: I don't really like to write them, but the LLM-generated tests are pretty bad, even the frontier models on xhigh thinking. I usually generate them, but I don't really have the confidence they test anything except 1==1. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the time spent on writing them manually.

leros
I generally produce nearly the same code I'd write myself about 5x faster with AI. I don't just let Claude Code run wild for a long time and have a mess to review. I have it do small chunks I can quickly review, give it feedback, iterate, etc until I like the output, then I move on to the next step. This takes time of course but I've found it faster than reviewing a giant mess of a code review.
hollowturtle
Share software you’re building
catchnear4321
if you were serious you would know this is an unserious bar to try and set.
what
Why? It would help understand what “the same code I would’ve written” means.
catchnear4321
if that were the intent it wouldn’t have needed someone else to explain the demand.
deterministic
Share the concrete problems you have with LLMs and we might be able to help you out.
deterministic
My experience as well. Opus 5.5 is really good at matching the existing coding style. I often look at code and think I wrote it, only to realize it was written by Opus.

The trick is to give it enough guidance about the style you prefer.

retrac
I only have a couple general suggestions.

Slop the tools, not your main code. Make slop tools ad hoc as you need them. Or: don't ask Claude to look for a bug or fix a bug ask it to write a script to fuzz inputs.

There's no way around reading and understanding the core logic. If you can't hold it in your head it will fall apart when you try to manipulate it like you've noticed. So it helps if you designed it, rather than letting it fall out of the AI. Otherwise you're reverse-engineering a design that was mindless. It's a slog!

I'm convinced that switching from Python to Haskell with its strong typing was a good hack. Auto-generated Haskell seems to be more coherent than generated Python. But Python has type declarations too, these days.

When all else fails, rewrite it, preferably in a different language. That used to be a tall order! But this is one thing LLMs are really good at. Rewriting and re-implementing. When you have two or three implementations in parallel, and a spec, you can start to bounce them off each other and contrary to intuition it gets more solid, not less.

aprdm
What's the problem of the solution proposed ? Don't read/write code anymore. Have strong harness. That's how my team of ~30 has been operating for the most part.

The problem we are trying to solve was never to write code, was to solve business problems

AnimalMuppet
"I don't understand the code anymore. It works." That's fine... today.

"I will never need to understand the code again" is a much different statement.

If you don't understand the code, and the code wasn't written by any human, when you're eventually painted into a corner, how hard is it going to be to get out? Will it be easier or harder than maintaining an understanding through however long it takes to get to that point?

You may be betting your company on the answer. How sure are you?

tripleee
How is this different than working at a company with hundreds of developers, on a massive codebase? Do you ever really understand the entirety of that?
AnimalMuppet
No. But somebody understood the high-level architecture, and somebody understood each piece in detail. And if you needed to work on piece X.Y.Z, you could find somebody who could tell you how X fit into the big picture, and somebody else who could tell you how Y fit in X, and somebody else who could tell you how Z fit into Y, and maybe somebody else who could tell you about the details of Z.
aprdm
Not really, no.

People come and go, documentation isn't great.

It's no different.

If I need to understand complex codebase with thousands of humans touching nowadays I am asking AI anyways

runjake
Yes. The whole time. But, you still need to write good specs if you want well-designed software. Agents are not magic.

- Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

- Go through the spec files with the agents, have it point out holes and problems, and then update the specs. Go through a few iterations of this and then start your agents on development.

Garbage in, garbage out.

ruffrey
Are you still saving time or effort using coding agents this way? How much (estimated)?
daringrain32781
> Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

When I'm building something new there's a good chance I don't know about a lot of problems (unknown unknowns). How do you overcome this with just spec files?

I keep coming back to this and the only way to develop properly without tons of hacks patching bugs afterwards is by working at a low level. I don't really write code but I work at the code level still and have Claude write each function and whatnot.

sigbottle
For personal projects, I've rewritten bounded integration parts for things all the time, and so far it's been fine. Coding agents are RL'd to get the thing done, they'd rather get to 95%, not realize there's some fundamental architectural flaw, and hack the last 5%, rather than taking that lesson and redesigning. That's your job.

For business settings, yeah I dunno, a ton of rewriting all the time is not seen as a good look.

runjake
I try to have a good overall idea of what I want to build from the start. Sometimes I don't know and that involves long walks and iterative conversations with the agents. It's okay to stub out functionality or modules and the agent will be comfortable with this. As the agent builds, I have it update an architecture document.

It's always good to have another agent (sans existing context) review the project for slop and hacks, best practices, security flaws, etc. I usually have Codex do one, and Claude do the other. Hope this makes sense.

piscaries
Agree, you can't spec what you don't know yet. Two things could help: Let the agent grill you before writing the spec. Answering its questions surfaces a lot of the unknowns. Then have a different model grill the plan, with questions specific to your product. In one case of mine, that caught a design issue which the generic review missed.
hollowturtle
> Write good specs into files, usually Markdown.

Specs that gets systematically ignored way too often XD

llmslave
Fable 5.1 is better than most engineers if prompted correctly
hey-hey
I think an underappreciated aspect is that we previously amortized the reading and comprehending over the time we spent designing and writing. I still find myself looking at changes expecting that I can review it in a few minutes when I am in effect coming in cold. That part of the job has changed, but fwiw it isn't so different than the experience I had reviewing another team's changes when I didn't know their services.

I have found the right harness helps, if you have a setup that gives you memory, specs and a graph-based understanding (that part is key) you can be very productive. For me, that's because being able to understand the big picture helps, the challenge of reading the code is always there but starting with 'this method/class/etc does X, so that means this is doing Y..." makes it easier and lets you come in warmer.

catchnear4321
once you can dial in a reviewer it starts feeling like managing a team with over-specialized skill sets.

the problem solving hasn’t changed, but the hands, or “hands”, are.

suspect some of what’s causing churn for some folks is they are getting to do the job they wanted without the title change and recognition, as well as with different approaches for doing the work.

it’s almost a return to the systems analyst era.

fishcycle
Curious whats in your setup that helps with graph-based understanding? I'm working with agents more these days and looking for better ways to get that kind of understanding
catchnear4321
Step one: just because claude can generate +50k/-50k line PRs doesn’t make it good.

Optimize the PR flow first.

faangguyindia
We have multiple apps, but I'll share only the free ones; the others are B2B (they haul in major revenue for us, and businesses dealing with us will not like us disclosing this here), largest free one is MacroCodex with 17,000+ users.

We do not have this problem; we heavily use the models from OpenAI and Anthropic, but we have a custom harness built for ultimate cache efficiency and a purpose tuned workflow.

Codex is GREAT but it keeps updating and its UI changes often (remember mini git sidebar ui?)

Our Custom Harness does multiple things, like having a "Skill Selector," which uses our Gambler v1 (26B decision model responds in <100ms locally) and overlays tools on top of existing ones (as the models are RLVL over the specific tool in their harness, we overlay those tools with a familiar interface or format and inject custom features we want the model to interpret). Other than this, it leverages local models to accelerate development. Also, instead of providing custom tools, we actually use the same tools that their original model-provided harness uses. We've a list of 100s of such optimizations; these are just a few from the top of my head.

I have been working on harnesses for a very long time; I read research papers and implement them.

The apps use Flutter and Rust for all of our apps; no ads, no subscriptions.

So, macrocodex is basically a neural network product which "predicts" maintenance calories at a very high accuracy, https://macrocodex.app/

MacroCodex beats everything in its category and it does it for free, no ads, no subscriptions.

Symbiote and CalorieCodex will soon follow the suite.

If it fails, people get fat instead of losing weight, or get skinny instead of gaining weight.

Recently, we launched CalorieCodex (a calorie tracking app with an optional Full Agent Harness, where an agent tracks calories for you) and Symbiote (a programmable workout app; think BoostCamp, but user-programmable so it can run any bodybuilding program).

You can find some screenshots here: https://macrocodex.app/guides/peak-week/

saluki
Having great success with Claude Code.

Short claude.md file, skills for various things like db schema, etc

For larger or complex features do a design session with claude, review design and make suggestions and collaborate, once design is dialed in ask to break in to tasks then do similar session collaboarating on plan.md files for each task/phase then have claude build it.

Claude is really really good at adding tests, leverage this for near 100% test coverage and it can also test that it's meeting the PRD/spec.

It's also creative and seems to like collaborating on the design and plan parts join in with that. Claude feels really similar to my favorite engineer I worked with as far as collaboration and even banter. It's nice.

Using claude code in the terminal btw, md files go in repo so all team, devs, consoles can see context across front and backend.

Use PRs run claude code review, I created a Minority Report style review skill as well, code quality, security, performance with anderton as the judge/orch

Then we have a human review PR as well

This process we are getting good code and faster velocity for sure, vs traditional SDLC for solo and with team

As far as reading the code, I think that will become less and less as long as it passes automated code review, it's performant, meets the spec and tests pass . . . SHIP IT

Watch DHH's recent RailsConf keynote, this is where we're heading, buckle up

keshwanianup
I am able to generate decent code with Claude Opus 4.7+ given the prompt is perfect. This is subject to generating new fresh code. Trying to fix bugs in existing code, specially multi-code repository setup - it's complicated!!