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A comment on Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by JimDabell on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @06:34AM (#46704199)
Who are you referring to here? If you follow the link, you will see that the Google engineer did not say that.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by keybored on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @08:25AM (#46705388)
I am quoting the person that I responded to. Which linked to this: https://xcancel.com/rakyll/status/2007659740126761033#m

> I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Cloud Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

So I see one error. GP said “couldn’t do”. The engineer really said “matched”.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by woooooo on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @11:50AM (#46708180)
The key words in the quote are "not everyone is aligned". It's not about execution ability.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by keybored on Thursday January 22, 2026 @02:08PM (#46723753)
The key words are “one hour”. So what if there is some mealy-mouthed preamble?
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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by woooooo on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:10AM (#46730259)
At big tech companies "were still finding alignment" is code for leadership not being able to make decisions and unblock execution.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by keybored on Friday January 23, 2026 @06:25AM (#46731207)
Dearest leadership not unblocking execution. What's that got to do with what we’re complaining about? Did Claude cure cancer (this is hyperbole) in one hour or not?
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Re:Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works? by woooooo on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:10AM (#46734183)
The point of the story to me was, with a clear idea of what they want, the person got a year's worth of Big Tech done in a few hours with Claude. Could have been a couple days with a tight team, either way, the problem wasn't the coding ability or typing speed.
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