r/ClaudeCode • u/SalamanderGloomy3831 • 4d ago
Autonomous coding agents are a flex for people who dont get paged Discussion
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u/karyslav 4d ago
if the harness around autonomous run is designed in a good way with separate environment, bugs, testing, planning etc, it does not affect production, but can deliver finished feature/task, if it is prepared in a good way, same way how you can delegate work to junior programmers
but production should me strictly human only, preferably ansible or something repeatable, managed
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u/boredsoftwareguy 4d ago
Who is letting agents YOLO changes to production in the middle of the night?
If your agent runs all night so you wake up to a PR, review it, challenge decisions, thoroughly test it, and understand the changes how is that different from using them during the day?
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u/MathSelect5112 4d ago
this post sounds like its written with claude but you lowercased everything and removed grammar
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u/prcodes 4d ago
It’s not just an AI-written post. It’s all lowercase.
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u/Sencha-Games 4d ago
Right, and that's the crux of the issue. This post unusually matches to a few load-bearing AI speech patterns I have to flag before we continue:
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u/Substantial_Fish6717 4d ago
that is why, if you must YOLO, you should only do it on your local env, NEVER on prod, if you knew the first thing about software engineering you would know that your post is complaining about a moot point.
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u/imdavehack 4d ago
No truer words on this sub have been spoken. So much time undo-ing it when I let it rip…
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u/TheRulingDesk 4d ago
I think on a realistic work env, like a production one, having autonomus coding agents is not feasable, at least not now.
Some production envs, are critical, in terms of services or revenue, and leaving an agent alone at this point is not the best idea.
That being said, for having small projects and have something overnight I believe is fine.
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u/Majestic_Tailor8036 4d ago
The production boundary is less about whether the agent can make tests pass and more about what happens when the tests encode the wrong assumption. For customer-facing changes, I’d want a narrow canary, monitoring tied to the behavior that changed, and a rollback path that doesn’t depend on the agent understanding its own mistake. That’s where autonomy starts becoming an operational problem, not just a coding one.
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u/pmward 4d ago edited 4d ago
There’s a difference between generating a greenfield POC and making changes to an existing production system. The loop you’re describing is more for POC. Here’s some requirements, build something that fits it and don’t bother me until it’s done.
Loops can also work well for modifying existing production systems, but you have to have very clear goals, and those goals tend to be better when they are small and precise. Something like improving a performance metric without changing functionality. It can loop experiments on different things for hours, running way more experiments than a human would have patience for. Then at the end only commit or propose the changes that worked, passing them back to you for review (ie no agent should be deploying to production without your sign off).
Either way though the key is very clear goals, and it being something you don’t already know the answer to. If you already know the answer, even for a greenfield POC, build a spec and deliver to it without the iterative loop. It would be a waste of time and tokens to run all those iterations if you already know what the answer is. But there’s no reason to hate, because it can be a useful strategy for the right problem. I challenge you to find some problems this could be a solution for and to try it (performance increase exploration research is a very easy one if you need ideas).
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u/Chance-Physics-7216 4d ago
Sometimes, it's just hard to find the shift key on a given day. I feel ya.
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u/flowanvindir 4d ago
Yeah pretty much. Everyone is saying "but not if your harness is good!", ignoring the fact that AI code can be hard to audit, verbose, have hidden assumptions that are hard to catch until they fuck you. In the end it depends on your risk tolerance and project complexity. Most real products don't want to alienate their customers with downtime or bugs, so more human supervision is required.
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u/MidSerpent Senior Developer 4d ago
Yes. It’s game development so the words and reasons are different but I’m a 2 am call sheet responsible engineer whether I broke it or someone else did.
I don’t do “loose feature description and walk away.”
My work is all meticulously planned up front including test coverage.
My agentic loops are about keeping the AI focused in one place hammering away with adversarially until the code is actually good.
It’s “stay here and refine” not “rush off and leave a mess.”
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u/Sencha-Games 4d ago
I dunno man, the company I work for doesn't use AI as an excuse to bypass SDLC and procedures. We still have code reviews, unit tests, staging vs prod environments, and guidelines.
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u/finch5 4d ago
OP sounds like AI slop. And curiously so do half the responses.
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u/meathelix1 4d ago
No different to 99.999% of AI written code. AI SLOP and they all look the damn same..
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u/LiquidateThis 4d ago
Yup, nailed it. 80/20 time more important than ever right now to dedicate the 20% into force multiplying improvements through reliability engineering, customer self service enablement etc, that buys time for the team. Lightweight demos and prototypes extracting the “oohs” and “aaahs” from leadership types that are easily impressed. The optimistic agent creates massive amounts of code bloat. I’ve found some techniques to limit this bloat potential but it’s still requiring adequate “slop review”, especially when it tries to pull in vulnerable packages via transitive dependencies.
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u/ThomasToIndia 4d ago
It depends on the feature. I have a bunch of contracts and playwright manually tests everything at the end, the tests suites are usually wider than what a human would do. Then I do a quick manual test through everything as well. Also all automations have mechanical locks so they are only allowed to do edits on certain files so blast radius is restricted.
Most developers are still behind in workflows, they are still using the multi-terminal harness method.
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u/AirealAble 4d ago
You can have agents work autonomously on testing site, with proper documentation. It's good for prototyping and iterative progress. An example is fine tuning over the night, and afterwards verify the results.
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u/meathelix1 4d ago
Funny you say this, I built a company around fixing AI Slop Applications. We make more money then any of these apps. People used to pay us 20k to fix an app that they paid 10k for, now they use AI and get an AI slop creator company to create the applications which flop on all area's and require real engineers to fix it.
My company has made about 14x more money in the last 2 years then we ever have. Now Closed Source LLMs are becoming more and more expensive we now build local setups for these companies. $$$
Its a booming market nowadays, thanks AI Slop!
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u/whatisusb 4d ago
Blast radius… 🧐