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The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns
- verdverm 9mo agolooks to be a good resource with lots of links thanks for the share!
- N_Lens 9mo agoI sometimes feel like the cognitive cost of agentic coding is so much higher than a skilled human. There is so much more bootstrap and handling process around making sure agents don't go off the rails (they will), or that they will adhere to their goals (they won't). And in my experience fixing issues downstream takes more effort than solving the issue at the root. The pipe dream of agents handling Github Issue -> PullRequest -> Resolve Issue becomes a nightmare of fixing downstream regressions or other chaos unleashed by agents given too much privilege. I think people optimistic on agents are either naive or hype merchants grifting/shilling. I can understand the grinning panic of the hype merchants because we've collectively shovelled so much capital into AI with very little to show for it so far. Not to say that AI is useless, far from it, but there's far more over-optimism than realistic assessment of the actual accuracy and capabilities.
- aaronrobinson 9mo agoIt can definitely feel like that right now but I think a big part of that is us learning to harness it. That’s why resources like this are so valuable. There’s always going to be pain at the start.
- nulone 9mo agoCognitive overhead is real. Spent the first few weeks fixing agent mess more than actually shipping. One thing that helped: force the agent to explain confidence before anything irreversible. Deleting a file? Tell me why you're sure. Pushing code? Show me the reasoning. Just a speedbump but it catches a lot. Still don't buy the full issue→PR dream though. Too many failure modes.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- MrOrelliOReilly 9mo agoThis is a great consolidation of various techniques and patterns for agentic coding. It’s valuable just to standardize our vocabulary in this new world of AI led or assisted programming. I’ve seen a lot of developers all converging toward similar patterns. Having clear terms and definitions for various strategies can help a lot in articulating the best way to solve a given problem. Not so different from approaching a problem and saying “hey, I think we’d benefit from TDD here.”
- Kerrick 9mo agoI recognized the need for this recently and started by documenting one [1]... then I dropped the ball because I, too, spent my winter holiday engrossed in agentic development. (Instead of documenting patterns.) I'm glad somebody kept writing! [1]: https://kerrick.blog/articles/2025/use-ai-to-stand-in-for-a-domain-expert/ https://kerrick.blog/articles/2025/use-ai-to-stand-in-for-a-...
- MrOrelliOReilly 9mo agoI will ruefully admit that I had also planned a similar blog post! I am hoping I can still add some value to the conversation, but it does seem like _everyone_ is writing about agentic development right now.
- Bukhmanizer 9mo agoI’d rather just read the prompt that this article was generated from.
- straydusk 9mo agoI finally found the perfect way to describe what I feel when I read stuff like this.
- ares623 9mo agoTempted to copy the content and launder it through another LLM and post a comment linking to my own version
- iwrrtp69 9mo agoI Would Rather Read The Prompt (IWRRTP)
- sebastiennight 9mo agoI hereby second the motion to get this acronym widely adopted
- alex_suzuki 9mo agoJTPP - just the prompt, please
- a_victorp 9mo agoI laughed when I noticed the username
- aj_g 9mo agoI remember some proto-memes about translation of some text between English and Chinese 100 times and the results being hilarious...modern parallel would be to ask a LLM to read the article, and generate the prompt that constructed the article. Then generate an article based on that prompt. Repeat x100.
- aitchnyu 9mo ago
- wiseowise 9mo agoSo it begins, Design Patterns and Agile/Scrum snake oil of modern times.
- bandrami 9mo agoNo no. We promise this solution has a totally different name.
- throwaway_0236 9mo agoIn the spirit of the article, I asked chatgpt to suggest names. One of the better ones were "Unified LLM Interaction Model (ULIM)". You read it here first...
- 63stack 9mo agoNo dude, you just don't get it, if you shout at the ai that YOU HAVE SUPERPOWERS GO READ YOUR SUPERPOWERS AT ..., then give it skills to write new skills, and then sprinkle anti grader reward hacking grader design.md with a bit of proactive agent state externalization (UPDATED), and then emotionally abuse it in the prompt, it's going to replace programmers and cure cancer yesterday. This is progress.
- laborcontract 9mo agoIf you're remotely interested in this type of stuff then scan papers arxiv[0] and you'll start to see patterns emerge. This article is awful from a readability standpoint and from an "does this author give me the impression they know what they're talking about" impression. But scrap that, it's better just thinking about agent patterns from scratch. It's a green field and, unless you consider yourself profoundly uncreative, the process of thinking through agent coordination is going to yield much greater benefit than eating ideas about patterns through a tube. 0: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=agent+architecture&searchtype=title&abstracts=show&order=-announced_date_first https://arxiv.org/search/?query=agent+architecture&searchtyp...
- Bishonen88 9mo agoAI written article about AI usage, building things with AI that others will use to build their own AI with. The future is now indeed.
- jbstack 9mo agoI feel like HN should have a policy of discouraging comments which accuse articles and other comments of being written by AI. We all know this happens, we all know it's a possibility, and often such comments may even be correct. But seeing this type of comment dozens of times a day on all sorts of different content is tedious. It almost feels like nobody can write anything anymore without someone immediately jumping up and saying "You used AI to write that!".
- simianparrot 9mo agoNo. Public shaming for sharing AI written slop is what we need more of.
- jbstack 9mo agoSuch public shaming loses its value when it's overused though (see: boy who cried wolf). The "written by AI" accusation is thrown around so much, when it often isn't even true, that it just triggers scepticism as the initial reaction. At least, it does for me.
- simianparrot 9mo agoBut it’s also true in this case. I’ve had my own comments claimed to be AI by someone because I used a phrase like “delve into”, but a few false positives from the over-eager are to be expected even if it’s not optimal.
- bluehat974 9mo agoAgentic Patterns website https://agentic-patterns.com/ https://agentic-patterns.com/ Github https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns
- 63stack 9mo agoI can imagine all the middle managers are just salivating at the idea of presenting this webpage to higher ups as part of their "AI Strategy" at the next shareholder meeting. Bullet point lists! Cool infographics! Foreign words in headings! 93 pages of problem statement -> solution! More bullet points as tradeoffs breakdown! UPDATED! NEW!
- epolanski 9mo agoSo it doesn't include the only useful thing: the actual agent "code".
- wiseowise 9mo ago> Star History How you know something is done either by a grifter or a starving student looking for work.
- alkonaut 9mo agoAll of this might as well be greek to me. I use ChatGPT and copy paste code snippets. Which was bleeding edge a year or two ago, and now it feels like banging rocks together when reading these types of articles. I never had any luck integrating agents, MCP, using tools etc. Like if I'm not ready to jump on some AI-spiced up special IDE, am I then going to just be left banging rocks together? It feels like some of these AI agent companies just decided "Ok we can't adopt this into the old IDE's so we'll build a new special IDE"?_Or did I just use the wrong tools (I use Rider and VS, and I have only tried Copilot so far, but feel the "agent mode" of Copilot in those IDE's is basically useless).
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoI feel like just use claude code. That is it. Use it you get the feel for it. Everyone is over complicating. It is like learning to code itself. You need flight hours.
- cobolexpert 9mo agoThis is something that continues to surprise me. LLMs are extremely flexible and already come prepackaged with a lot of "knowledge", you don't need to dump hundreds of lines of text to explain to it what good software development practices are. I suspect these frameworks/patterns just fill up the context with unecessary junk.
- vidarh 9mo agoYou get to 80% there (numbers pulled out of the air) by just telling it to do things. You do need more to get from 80% there to 90%+ there. How much more depends on what you're trying to do and in what language (e.g. "favourite" pet peeve: Claude occasionally likes to use instance_variable_get() in Ruby instead of adding accessors; it's a massive code smell), but there are some generic things, such as giving it instructions on keeping notes and giving them subagents to farm out repetitive tasks to prevent the individual task completion from filling up the context for tasks that are truly independent (in which case, for Claude Code at least, you can also tell it to do multiple in parallel) But, indeed, just starting Claude Code (or Codex; I prefer Claude but it's a "personality thing" - try tools until you click with one) and telling it to do something is the most important step up from a chat window.
- _pdp_ 9mo agoIf you are interested here is a list of actual agentic patterns - https://go.cbk.ai/patterns https://go.cbk.ai/patterns
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> The Real Bottleneck: Time Already a "no", the bottleneck is "drowning under your own slop". Ever noticed how fast agents seems to be able to do their work in the beginning of the project, but the larger it grows, it seems to get slower at doing good changes that doesn't break other things? This is because you're missing the "engineering" part of software engineering, where someone has to think about the domain, design, tradeoffs and how something will be used, which requires good judgement and good wisdom regarding what is a suitable and good design considering what you want to do. Lately (last year or so), more client jobs of mine have basically been "Hey, so we have this project that someone made with LLMs, they basically don't know how it works, but now we have a ton of users, could you redo it properly?", and in all cases, the applications have been built with zero engineering and with zero (human) regards to design and architecture. I have no yet have any clients come to me and say "Hey, our current vibe-coders are all busy and don't have time, help us with X", it's always "We've built hairball X, rescue us please?", and that to me makes it pretty obvious what the biggest bottleneck with this sort of coding is. Moving slower is usually faster long-term granted you think about the design, but obviously slower short-term, which makes it kind of counter-intuitive.
- ajjahs 9mo ago[dead]
- catlifeonmars 9mo ago> Moving slower is usually faster long-term granted you think about the design, but obviously slower short-term, which makes it kind of counter-intuitive. Like an old mentor of mine used to say: “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast”
- comboy 9mo agoHere's a pattern I noticed - you notice some pattern that is working (let's say planning or TODO management) - if the pattern is indeed solid then it gets integrated into the black box and your agent starts doing that internally. At which point your abstraction on top becomes defective because agents get confused about planning the planning. So with the top performers I think what's most effective is just stating clearly what the end result you want to be (with maybe some hints for verification of results which is just clarifying the intent more)
- zuInnp 9mo agoNot only is the website layout horrible to read, it also smells like the article was written by AI. My brain just screams "no" when I try to read that.
- wesselbindt 9mo agoSeems like a reasonable feeling to have. Anything that's not worth writing is not worth reading imo.
- ffsm8 9mo agoEh, you're going too far with that IMO. The other day we were discussing a new core architecture for a Microservice we were meant to split out of a "larger" Microservice so that separate teams could maintain each part. Instead of just discussing it entirely without any basis, I instead made a quick prototype via explicit prompts telling the LLM exactly what to create, where etc. Finally, I asked it to go through the implementation and create a wiki page, concatting the code and outlining in 1-4 sentences above each "file" excerpt what the goal for the file is. In the end, I went through it to double-check if it held up from my intentions - which it did and thus didn't change anything Now we could all discuss the pros and cons of that architecture while going through it, and the intro sentence gave enough context to each code excerpt to improve understanding/reduce mental load as necessary context was added to each segment. I would not have been able to allot that time to do all this without an LLM - especially the summarization to 1-3 sentences, so I'll have to disagree when you state this generally. Though I definitely agree that a blog article like this isn't worth reading if the author couldn't even be arsed to write it themselves.
- wiseowise 9mo agoDon't worry, it's not supposed to be read. The idea is to induce FOMO and subscribe to authors newsletter to get more "insights".
- gbnwl 9mo agoIt’s also just fluff and straight up wrong at parts. This wasn’t checked by a human or at least a human who understands enough to catch inaccuracies. For example for “Plan-then-execute” (which is presented as some sort of novel pattern rather than literally just how Claude Code works right out of the box) it says: “Plan phase – The LLM generates a fixed sequence of tool calls before seeing any untrusted data Execution phase – A controller runs that exact sequence. Tool outputs may shape parameters, but cannot change which tools run” But of course the agent doesn’t plan an exact fixed sequence of tool calls and rigidly stick to it, as it’s going to respond to the outputs which can’t be known ahead of time. Anyone who’s watched Claude work has seen this literally every day. This is just more slop making it to the top of HN because people out of the loop want to catch up on agents and bookmark any source that seems promising.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoYou should definitely read the whole thing, but tl;dr - Generate a stable sequence of steps (a plan), then carry it out. Prevents malicious or unintended tool actions from altering the strategy mid-execution and improves reliability on complex tasks. - Provide a clear goal and toolset. Let the agent determine the orchestration. Increases flexibility and scalability of autonomous workflows. - Have the agent generate, self-critique, and refine results until a quality threshold is met. - Provide mechanisms to interrupt and redirect the agent’s process before wasted effort or errors escalate. Effective systems blend agent autonomy with human oversight. Agents should signal confidence and make reasoning visible; humans should intervene or hand off control fluidly. If you've ever heard of "continuous improvement", now is the time to learn how that works, and hook that into your AI agents.
- galaxyLogic 9mo agoCould I ask the AI to create me a set of template-files as described by you above? Or if there is an example set of template files somewhere then ask the AI to do its thing based on those? Or ask the AI to create me such a set of template files for it to work on? I mean why do I need to read from HN what to do, if AI is so knowledgable and even agentic?
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoYeah absolutely. But you'll need to modify it until it works better for your use case. It's all still highly flawed, but also highly capable. Like a very fast janitor that occasionally uses chocolate syrup instead of soap to mop the floor.
- galaxyLogic 9mo agoLOL
- vemv 9mo agoWhy is this at the top? I've flagged it, that's what we should be doing with AI content.
- drdrek 9mo agoThe word cost is mentioned only twice in the entire article, lol
- mellosouls 9mo agoNot wanting to be a gatekeeper, but the author appears to be a "AI Growth Innovator" or some-such-I-don't-know-what rather than an actual engineer who has been ramping up on AI use to see what works in production: https://www.nibzard.com/about https://www.nibzard.com/about Scaled GitHub stars to 20,000+ Built engaged communities across platforms (2.8K X, 5.4K LinkedIn, 700+ YouTube) etc, etc. No doubt impressive to marketing types but maybe a pinch of salt required for using AI Agents in production.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoThat's so trite, what makes people write such sentences and not feel embarrassed? I remember when bragging so callously about arbitrary stuff would make you seem off-putting, what happened with that? Today it seems like everyone is bragging about what they do more than actually doing, and others seem fine with this, just part of "the hustle", where did we go wrong?
- somebehemoth 9mo agothe sell outs took over.
- ozim 9mo agoI was hoping that's some sitting in the basement playing hard with LLMs dude post. But that's a dead give away he is just scaling GitHub stars not doing actual research.
- dist-epoch 9mo agoAm I the only one with scrolling issues in Firefox on this website? It literally gets "stuck" and becomes un-scrollable.
- at__ 9mo agoThe emergence of this kind of thing has been so surprising to me. The exact same sort of person that managed to bottleneck themselves and obliterate signal-to-noise ratios at every company they work for with endless obsession over the trivial minutiae of the systems they are working with have found a way to do it with LLMs, too, which I would have assumed would have been the death of this kind of busywork
- kstenerud 9mo agoIt's unbelievable how productive AI has made me. With the release of the latest Claude, I'm now able to achieve 100x more than I could have without it. In one week, I fine-tuned https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/ https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/ for maximum decoding efficiency and: * Had Claude do a go version (https://github.com/kstenerud/go-bonjson https://github.com/kstenerud/go-bonjson), which outperforms the JSON codec. * Had Claude do a Rust version (https://github.com/kstenerud/rs-bonjson https://github.com/kstenerud/rs-bonjson), which outperforms the JSON codec. * Had Claude do a Swift version (https://github.com/kstenerud/swift-bonjson https://github.com/kstenerud/swift-bonjson), which outperforms the JSON codec (although this one took some time due to the Codable, Encoder, Decoder interfaces). * Have Claude doing a Python version with Rust underpinnings (making this fast is proving challenging) * Have Claude doing a Jackson version (in progress, seems to be not too bad) In ONE week. This would have taken me a year otherwise, getting the base library going, getting a test runner going for the universal tests, figuring out how good the SIMD support is and what intrinsics I can use, what's the best tooling for hot path analysis, trying various approaches, etc etc. x5. Now all I do is give Claude a prompt, a spec, and some hand-holding for the optimization phase (admittedly, it starts off at 10x slower, so you have to watch the algorithms it uses). But it's head-and-shoulders above what I could do in the last iteration of Claude. I can experiment super quickly: Try caching previously encountered keys and show me the performance change. 5 mins, done. Would take me a LOT longer to retool the code just for a quick test. Experiments are dirt cheap now. The biggest bottleneck right now is that I keep hitting my token limits 1-2 hours before each reset ;-)
- vivzkestrel 9mo agothats all? I made an emulator for every single console in the planet called Universal Emulator in one week, I have not published it because that would be illegal /s