You're not doing anything wrong. You have to read past hyperbole.
Here's how the article starts: "Agentic engineering has become so good that it now writes pretty much 100% of my code. And yet I see so many folks trying to solve issues and generating these elaborated charades instead of getting sh*t done."
- I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens.
- My current approach is usually that I start a discussion with codex, I paste in some websites, some ideas, ask it to read code, and we flesh out a new feature together.
- If you do a bigger refactor, codex often stops with a mid-work reply. Queue up continue messages if you wanna go away and just see it done
- When things get hard, prompting and adding some trigger words like “take your time” “comprehensive” “read all code that could be related” “create possible hypothesis” makes codex solve even the trickiest problems.
- My Agent file is currently ~800 lines long and feels like a collection of organizational scar tissue. I didn’t write it, codex did.
It's the same magical incantations and elaborated charades as everyone does. The "the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering" is full of bs and has nothing concrete except a single link to a bunch of incantations for agents. No idea what his actual "website + tauri app + mobile app" is that he build 100% with AI, but depending on actual functionality, after burning $1000 a month on tokens you may actually have a fully functioning app in React + Typescript with little human supervision.
(OP) You know if I link to a half-finished project, people would take it apart as many don't understand the nuance between crap and simply not done yet. But if you follow me on twitter it'll take you a few minutes to figure out. I'm two months in, even with AI, shipping good stuff takes time.
Having scrolled through several pages of your complaining about idiots on HN or discussing a yet another AI tool, I guess this is it: https://sweetistics.com/ ? Something you couldn't link in the article for some reason?
I've scrolled bit more. I think in the past 50-100 tweets you only wrote thee talking about this, one of them proudly showing a mistake (invalid tweets containing the same text): https://x.com/steipete/status/1978229441802162548
So, I have to follow you on twitter and sift through garbage indistinguishable from all such "look how great is codex" and "this is my shamanic ritual that works I promise" to maybe see something you work on.
No thank you. I will make my judgement from the long-form article you posted.
And, as I said: depending on actual functionality, after burning $1000 a month on tokens you may actually have a fully functioning app in React + Typescript with little human supervision. I might do the same for anything Twitter-related because I couldn't be arsed to work with Twitter or Twitter APIs.
It includes that with AI you still need someone to work. First to query the AI and then to fix up something and to bring it in a form you can release and use.
$5.75/hr is well below outsourced rates. It’s $1.40/hr if the agent runs without stopping. If I hired a human consultant for a project of any size, I could easily spend $10,000 or more on just scoping and contract approval. Humans don’t win on cost.
Right now they still need someone typing prompts and verifying them. When they do what you intend it means that is no longer more work to handhold them than doing it yourself, but it is still work.
Here's how the article starts: "Agentic engineering has become so good that it now writes pretty much 100% of my code. And yet I see so many folks trying to solve issues and generating these elaborated charades instead of getting sh*t done."
Here's how it continues:
- I run between 3-8 in parallel
- My agents do git atomic commits, I iterated a lot on the agents file: https://gist.github.com/steipete/d3b9db3fa8eb1d1a692b7656217...
- I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens.
- My current approach is usually that I start a discussion with codex, I paste in some websites, some ideas, ask it to read code, and we flesh out a new feature together.
- If you do a bigger refactor, codex often stops with a mid-work reply. Queue up continue messages if you wanna go away and just see it done
- When things get hard, prompting and adding some trigger words like “take your time” “comprehensive” “read all code that could be related” “create possible hypothesis” makes codex solve even the trickiest problems.
- My Agent file is currently ~800 lines long and feels like a collection of organizational scar tissue. I didn’t write it, codex did.
It's the same magical incantations and elaborated charades as everyone does. The "the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering" is full of bs and has nothing concrete except a single link to a bunch of incantations for agents. No idea what his actual "website + tauri app + mobile app" is that he build 100% with AI, but depending on actual functionality, after burning $1000 a month on tokens you may actually have a fully functioning app in React + Typescript with little human supervision.