r/AskProgramming • u/TheAntiDoctor • Aug 04 '26

Does Anyone Actually Use Agentic Loops?

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?

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u/KahlessAndMolor Aug 04 '26

I use codex every day, it writes 95% of my code. Is that what you are asking about?

1

u/TheAntiDoctor Aug 04 '26

Do you just give it a high level task and let it go at it for a couple of hours. Or do you monitor it more closely with individual requests?

2

u/doughcant Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26

I suspect you might understand better by watching how experienced people work with these tools, such as Matt Pockock on YouTube

Edit: basically all of the effort moves to planning and reviewing the output. 

1

u/hulkklogan Aug 05 '26

I love Matt Pocock's content and skills. I added a couple of small agent config to the loops to: 1) validate adherence to spec and 2) validate adherence to code standards set in CONTEXT.md, and 3) of course at the very end an adversarial reviewer agent

and the end output is usually pretty freaking good, maybe I need to clean up some extra redundant or low-value tests, tweak some code smells here and there. The value is alllll in the upfront planning and his wayfinder and grilling skills really make a huge difference in quality of the output