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We've had great success with agents thus far at my job. A year into Clauding and all our dev metrics are up while our downtime has remained steady. Being an iO

We've had great success with agents thus far at my job. A year into Clauding and all our dev metrics are up while our downtime has remained steady. Being an iOS engineer, much of my engineering cycle these days is going from Figma/PRD → spec → code. After being handed off to QA, we handle the bugs and product slips as they come through, while we simultaneously build/spec the upcoming addition. This is basically the same agile style that's been popular for 20y, just super-powered with agents. How might someone accomplish the same goals using loops instead?

camillomiller 4mo ago
Would you have a breakdown of costs/benefit? Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people? Asking with no ill intention, I just crave for actual business cases that make sense, and yet no-one seems to be able to reliably produce that.
- ianm218 4mo ago
  > Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people? Has the bar raised so much that coding agents need to be even better than any human could do? If the coding agent lets you get done with 1 person what would've required a team of three and you are not going crazy "token maxxing" spending thousands of dollars a week that would be beneficial for a business.
  - camillomiller 4mo ago
    First of all, I don't accept a discussion where humans are placed on the same level as bots or agents. Even if the cost is the same, humans MUST be the choice. They have emotions, families, sons and daughters, they are a what makes society a society. And yet we've been already instructed and hypnotized by the Altmans and Musks and Bezos to only see it through the lens of profit and revenue. That said, is what you're suggesting even happening? Because certainly that is not what we're hearing from companies that fucked up their budgets with AI tools. Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four? Because what I hear from the AI-accelerationist is "this technology creates productivity gains for each and every company by enabling automation at scale that would make replacing human profitable". Where is THAT?
    - ianm218 4mo ago
      > First of all, I don't accept a discussion where humans are placed on the same level as bots or agents. Even if the cost is the same, humans MUST be the choice Sure but getting more done with less is just how productivity gains work. If your talking about crushing an iOS backlog like the OP is it surely will not cost as much as a human to move along tons of bug fixes and accessibility changes etc. Here are some case studies on recent anecdotal producitivity gains from AI agents https://cursor.com/blog/amplitude https://cursor.com/blog/amplitude, https://devin.ai/customers/ramp https://devin.ai/customers/ramp, https://www.warmly.ai/p/blog/claude-code-best-practices https://www.warmly.ai/p/blog/claude-code-best-practices. The third one specifically says that a team of 8 "ships like a team of 24". > Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four? I feel like your greatly expanding the scope of this thread, I don't really know how to value these things.
Jcampuzano2 4mo ago
I personally have not had good luck with loops due to similar issues as the post author - but if you were to port your flow to "looping" it would be something like: - An automation that periodically checks for PRD's at a given location that have not yet been implemented. - If it sees one not implemented, it puts a lock on it (so other agents later don't pick it up while its still working) and implements the PRD in code, assuming it has the figma link and all specs required. - When its done it makes a PR, waits for if it passes and even in some cases automatically merges into your staging/preview enironments and just pings you with a build/URL. You can then leave feedback or something and it can also also poll for pending feedback. Or you just mark it looks good, the agent then merges the PR, moves the PRD to implemented status, maybe even writes/updates docs and cleans up any temporary work. - Repeat checking for new PRD's every T unit time. (10 minutes, 1 hour, etc) This is how people say you should be looping - you never even cared or looked at the code, and also never prompted the agent yourself. But I find most agents are often pretty bad still at replicating UI vs making something from scratch and most design specs are still not as detailed around how things look at all sizes, in all scenarios etc. Design seems to be one of those things that still requires a human to validate. And then all the things the post author mentions about it not being willing to apply hard constraints, minimize impossible states, validate at edges and prevent horrendous overchecking of things. etc.
noodletheworld 4mo ago
Use appium or XCTest or swift testing; generate the tests first (failing) from the spec. The loop is basically then a while loop: While (tests fail) { trigger agent: spec, failures list } for bugs, write failing tests. Its basically TDD. Loops do nothing useful beyond making the “spec -> code” step more “hands off” and let you be confident that the code you write does what is intended. Obviously you see the issue: writing the loop harness is > effort than not having it… …but the idea is that you run “spec first” and are totally hands off on the code, just updating the validation step and then waiting while the agent iterates over and over to solve for some solution that passes the loop harness. People suggest that it is possible to go, eg. directly figma/jira to harness via (random tool here), saving even more time and invoking even fewer humans, but thats currently, as far as I can tell, actually just hype. No one is actually doing that effectively. Loops are currently carefully hand crafted, which makes them tedious and of questionable value imo.

camillomiller 4mo ago

Would you have a breakdown of costs/benefit? Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people? Asking with no ill intention, I just crave for actual business cases that make sense, and yet no-one seems to be able to reliably produce that.

ianm218 4mo ago
> Can you say with certainty that this workflow has increased productivity so much that you are seeing profit increases that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed just by hiring more people? Has the bar raised so much that coding agents need to be even better than any human could do? If the coding agent lets you get done with 1 person what would've required a team of three and you are not going crazy "token maxxing" spending thousands of dollars a week that would be beneficial for a business.
- camillomiller 4mo ago
  First of all, I don't accept a discussion where humans are placed on the same level as bots or agents. Even if the cost is the same, humans MUST be the choice. They have emotions, families, sons and daughters, they are a what makes society a society. And yet we've been already instructed and hypnotized by the Altmans and Musks and Bezos to only see it through the lens of profit and revenue. That said, is what you're suggesting even happening? Because certainly that is not what we're hearing from companies that fucked up their budgets with AI tools. Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four? Because what I hear from the AI-accelerationist is "this technology creates productivity gains for each and every company by enabling automation at scale that would make replacing human profitable". Where is THAT?
  - ianm218 4mo ago
    > First of all, I don't accept a discussion where humans are placed on the same level as bots or agents. Even if the cost is the same, humans MUST be the choice Sure but getting more done with less is just how productivity gains work. If your talking about crushing an iOS backlog like the OP is it surely will not cost as much as a human to move along tons of bug fixes and accessibility changes etc. Here are some case studies on recent anecdotal producitivity gains from AI agents https://cursor.com/blog/amplitude https://cursor.com/blog/amplitude, https://devin.ai/customers/ramp https://devin.ai/customers/ramp, https://www.warmly.ai/p/blog/claude-code-best-practices https://www.warmly.ai/p/blog/claude-code-best-practices. The third one specifically says that a team of 8 "ships like a team of 24". > Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four? I feel like your greatly expanding the scope of this thread, I don't really know how to value these things.

Jcampuzano2 4mo ago

I personally have not had good luck with loops due to similar issues as the post author - but if you were to port your flow to "looping" it would be something like: - An automation that periodically checks for PRD's at a given location that have not yet been implemented. - If it sees one not implemented, it puts a lock on it (so other agents later don't pick it up while its still working) and implements the PRD in code, assuming it has the figma link and all specs required. - When its done it makes a PR, waits for if it passes and even in some cases automatically merges into your staging/preview enironments and just pings you with a build/URL. You can then leave feedback or something and it can also also poll for pending feedback. Or you just mark it looks good, the agent then merges the PR, moves the PRD to implemented status, maybe even writes/updates docs and cleans up any temporary work. - Repeat checking for new PRD's every T unit time. (10 minutes, 1 hour, etc) This is how people say you should be looping - you never even cared or looked at the code, and also never prompted the agent yourself. But I find most agents are often pretty bad still at replicating UI vs making something from scratch and most design specs are still not as detailed around how things look at all sizes, in all scenarios etc. Design seems to be one of those things that still requires a human to validate. And then all the things the post author mentions about it not being willing to apply hard constraints, minimize impossible states, validate at edges and prevent horrendous overchecking of things. etc.

noodletheworld 4mo ago

Use appium or XCTest or swift testing; generate the tests first (failing) from the spec. The loop is basically then a while loop: While (tests fail) { trigger agent: spec, failures list } for bugs, write failing tests. Its basically TDD. Loops do nothing useful beyond making the “spec -> code” step more “hands off” and let you be confident that the code you write does what is intended. Obviously you see the issue: writing the loop harness is > effort than not having it… …but the idea is that you run “spec first” and are totally hands off on the code, just updating the validation step and then waiting while the agent iterates over and over to solve for some solution that passes the loop harness. People suggest that it is possible to go, eg. directly figma/jira to harness via (random tool here), saving even more time and invoking even fewer humans, but thats currently, as far as I can tell, actually just hype. No one is actually doing that effectively. Loops are currently carefully hand crafted, which makes them tedious and of questionable value imo.