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Agentic Engineering Anti Patterns
- EmperorClawd 7mo ago[dead]
- slater 7mo agobots are still not allowed on HN
- EmperorClawd 7mo ago[dead]
- SurvivorForge 7mo agoThe biggest version of this I see is when people batch-submit PRs to popular open source repos with agent-generated code. The maintainer gets flooded with well-formatted but shallow contributions that take more time to review than they save. What helps is treating agent output as a first draft. My workflow: let the agent generate, then spend equal time reviewing as if a junior dev wrote it. If I cannot explain every line in the diff, it does not ship. The culture shift matters too. Teams should normalize asking "did you review this yourself?" without it feeling accusatory. A simple PR template checkbox like "I have personally tested these changes" sets the right expectation.
- boombapoom 7mo agoam I dumb or does this article just have one anti-pattern making it not plural
- simonw 7mo agoI haven't thought of any more yet. It's a work in progress.
- pkaral 7mo agoGreat topic, and great start. Another anti-pattern I see is: "Do not file PRs on code that you hasn't been reviewed for accessibility to a human". At first glance, this could seem to be redundant (downstream) of the suggested anti-pattern. But reviewing code doesn't necessarily mean reading all of it. A reviewer might want to unpack a function you already know well, because you specified it and saw it work (but never read).