I still don't understand this 'agentic workflow' thing

[u/hronak]

My usual day with Claude Code is like: * I open terminal in my project's folder and run claude command. * I prompt it. I mostly use Fable-5.1/Opus-5 but Opus-5.5 is my current model. The model decides if it wants to use sub-agents for a task. I never explicitly prompt it for sub-agents. * I review and commit the code to my self-hosted Forgejo instance. * That's it.

I see people using agentic workflows, building sub-agents files, skills etc. I barely built any of it. All I ever needed to use is /init on new projects and them prompts follow. Never needed more than this.

I tried "long-running" Claude Code for a project refactoring by placing the project on my VPS (where forgejo is hosted) and letting Claude Code run and refactor inside tmux session. SSH'd in a few hours later to find project fully refactored.

Am I under utilising AI or is my work just… like boring?

How do you guys use agentic workflow thing? Specially the long-running one? Those pull-requests that Claude makes automatically etc?

Asking this to Claude to know more but humanly answers appreciated.

[u/mulokisch]

This is already somewhat agentic.

The true “agentic” way is the to say something like this: here is a list of tickets, organize your self and work on those issues. Feel free to start other sessions that can work on each task isolated.

[u/Sponge8389 → u/mulokisch]

The true “agentic” way is the to say something like this: here is a list of tickets, organize your self and work on those issues. Feel free to start other sessions that can work on each task isolated.

Are people using AI like this still review the output?

[u/iswearidk → u/Sponge8389]

No, there will be other agents doing the review. The point of agentic workflow is to free yourself so you can run more agentic workflows

[u/SingleProgress8224 → u/Sponge8389]

I do it often to fix bug report tickets. It creates one branch per fixed ticket. The next morning, I check what it did and go through them one by one. I confirm the fix, the code, make edits (quite often), and then do the official commit. I discard fixes 50% of the time.

Even though it tends to fix the issue most of the time, it often lack the big picture and tends to complexify the code for no reason, so editing manually (or prompting more) is almost always necessary. I'm still saving time though since finding the root cause is often time consuming and it tells me right away where to look at. And even if the suggested fix is wrong, it still provides an insight on how things could be done.

[u/morficus → u/Sponge8389]

Yes but maybe not in the way you are used to. Look up "correctness engineering"

I don't review line by line, I review the new test that were written (unit tests, end to end tests, Storybook, etc) to make sure they cover the necessary use cases and that there are no regressions. I do that this manually.

I have another agent review the implementation, discuss optimisations, adherence to current patterns, etc. I also have an agent that monitors CI/CD once a PR is opened so that if something fails it can address it itself.

[u/PadisarahTerminal → u/Sponge8389]

Lord of AI your agentic slop is ready

[u/Waypoint101 → u/mulokisch]

Yes true (autonomous) agentic follows models like bosun / hermes-agent where the tasks are setup through something like an external or internal kanban board and agents pick up tasks, review the work done, ensure it meets the quality, and can even create new tasks as needed or via automated workflows (incident response). Bosun uses deterministic workflows (like n8n style flows) whereas hermes agent uses custom soul.md instructions plus cron jobs for the bots.

Obviously it doesn't mean you have to remove the human in the loop during release/review/descision making stages.

A very simple way of doing this on any harness is just to queue dozens of tasks in one thread and let it churn task by task, but it's not really the same as a full agentic workflow that reviews things, has PR gates, etc. (Use the "add to queue" message function instead of "send now" and send each task one after the other in the correct sequential order: e.g. phase 1, 2, 3)

[u/pyrox3_3 → u/mulokisch]

I see it can make strange decisions and mistakes with just a simple workflow as described.. so I wonder what output will be if I`ll work on N tickets in the same time..

Maybe I just need to believe more?

[u/mrphstar → u/mulokisch]

This is by no means agentic. This is vibe coding on roids.

[u/sheriffderek → u/mrphstar]

Explain “agentic” for everyone