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?
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.
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.
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.