alt Hacker Newsi'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this.
I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast knowledge of software engineering. As their team leader i make them go through planning, implementation, bug sweeping cycles using strict workflows. And it works quite well, i've been working on several large projects (1M+ LOC java,typescript,c/c++) and by any measure the projects are healthy. Sure the code isn't that beautiful, sure i'd have written things differently but it's pretty good nonetheless.
Shameless plug here: i've been also working on https://kodfactory.com, the code factory i've built to work on these large projects with workflows, reviews, etc ... I'm cleaning things up to open source it later.
Replies
> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
Every time you see a benchmark for "how long the agent can go without asking for human intervention", that's encouraging vibe coding.
I can one shot a prompt if I write down a nice spec file, Claude can do a lot in one shot. I test it every few months. With enough detail Claude will know what to do.
> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
because that's the end goal? and for simple small stuff they're already there?
> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
They do often enough that it's not a surprising event, depending on prompt quality, context available, ability for the result to be objectively judged and iterate on by the agent, etc. For frontiers on very high settings at least.
If you explicitly ask the agent to make the perfect architecture for the problem and write it down in to a spec and have the developer agents follow it they will. Its just that coding agents have a hard time coding at think about architecture at the same time.
> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.
because that's how agents are marketed.