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Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by Terr_ on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @12:27PM (#47250809)
I predict the main democratization change is going to be how easy people can make plumbing that doesn't require--or at least not obviously require--such specificity or mental-modeling of the business domain.

For example, "Generate me some repeatable code to ask system X for data about Y, pull out value Z, and submit it to system W."

Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by devin on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @01:00PM (#47251308)
What happens when value Z is not >= X? What happens when value Z doesn't exist, but values J and K do? What should be done when...

I hear what you're saying, but I think it's going to be entertaining watching people go "I guess this is why we paid Bob all of that money all those years".

Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by pc86 on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @01:52PM (#47252074)
This seems needlessly nitpicky. Of course there will be edge cases, there always are in everything, so pointing out that edge cases may exist isn't helpful.

But it stands to reason that would be a huge shift if a system accessible to non-technical users could mostly handle those edge cases, even when "handle" means failing silently without taking the entire thing down, or simply raising them for human intervention via Slack message or email or a dashboard or something.

And Bob's still going to get paid a lot of money he'll just be doing stuff that's more useful than figuring out how negative numbers should be parsed in the ETL pipeline.

Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by jimbokun on Thursday March 05, 2026 @07:59PM (#47269412)
Edge cases are pretty much the reason you need professional developers, even before LLMs started writing code.
Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by Terr_ on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @01:13PM (#47251487)
Hence the "not obviously require" bit: Some portion of those "simply gluing things together" will not actually be simple in truth. It'll work for a time until errors come to a head, then suddenly they'll need a professional to rip out the LLM asbestos and rework it properly.

That said, we should not underestimate the ability of companies to limp along with something broken and buggy, especially when they're being told there's no budget to fix it. (True even before LLMs.)

Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by jimbokun on Thursday March 05, 2026 @07:58PM (#47269401)
LLM generated code is replacing the hacked together spread sheet running many businesses.
Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by pixl97 on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @04:42PM (#47254334)
> when value Z is not >= X?

Is your AI not even doing try/catch statements, what century are you in?

Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by devin on Thursday March 05, 2026 @11:28AM (#47263684)
Did you just arrogantly suggest that my LLM should use exceptions for control flow? Funny stuff!
Re:Agentic Engineering Patterns by jimbokun on Thursday March 05, 2026 @07:56PM (#47269392)
How do you model the business domain without modeling the business domain?