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- Hacker News
- (February 2026)by xnx
- Long-time reader of simonwillison.net here. It's a nice guide, but I think it's missing a few points. Point 1: Software architecture is still a differentiator in the agent era. It is the single measure that separates absolute bu..sh..t from gold. Point 2: LLM/Agent does not suffer from the maintenance burden; the human owner does. So you must somehow "make it *feel* the same suffering" when the codebase starts to become a sh.t pile. Point 3: Agent by default does not align with your goals - they pretend to be - so you need an alignment system to ensure it would do everything to achieve *your goal* (not its own goal).by drpython
- Post from February;
Large related discussions on Agentic Engineering Patterns:
- one theory I am thinking through is that people say AI is good at greenfield and has a harder time editing code in a legacy code base.
So maybe you just treat projects as greenfield instead of editing.
Like if you want to make changes to a page you generate a new version of the page instead of editing the old one in place.
Then you keep the old version as fallback if problems come up with the new version.
by pianopatrick - Simon, if you're reading this, I'm a huge fan of so much of your work! Rodney CLI has been a game changer for local development. I have a few open PRs that I've contributed but it doesn't look active. Are you planning on maintaining it or should I fork it?by goeric
- I kinda feel that this person makes a lot of noise in this website. Can we rate limit them a bit?by stein1946
- A few nits:
1. Writing code is cheap now
Change to "generating code is cheap", reserve "writing" for the manually written code for the pre-AI era. I think this is a good wording separation.
2. Agentic Engineering Patterns
I must ask to add at least a chapter to be read by agent. I.e., patterns just to tell agents how human might be working when working with them. Without this, I believe the book's content will be less relevant in 3 months, but with that, it feels a agentic-native book to me. (this is not try to be cute, we have to write for agents now)