logoalt Hacker News

Agentic Patterns

154 pointsby PretzelFischlast Sunday at 7:24 PM44 commentsview on HN

Comments

nialseyesterday at 11:02 AM

Note: At the point of writing this, the comments are largely skeptical.

Reading this as an avid Codex CLI user, some things make sense and reflect lessons learned along the way. However, the patterns also get stale fast as agents improve and may be counterproductive. One such pattern is context anxiety, which probably reflects a particular model more than a general problem, and is likely an issue that will go away over time.

There are certainly patterns that need to be learned, and relearned over time. Learning the patterns is sort of an anti-pattern, since it is the model that should be trained to alleviate its shortcomings rather than the human. Then again, a successful mindset over the last three years has been to treat models as another form of intelligence, not as human intelligence, by getting to know them and being mindful of their strengths and weaknesses. This is quite a demanding task in terms of communication, reflection, and perspective-taking, and it is understandable that this knowledge is being documented.

But models change over time. The strengths and weaknesses of yesterday’s models are not the same as today’s, and reasoning models have actually removed some capabilities. A simple example is giving a reasoning model with tools the task of inspecting logs. It will most likely grep and parse out smaller sections, and may also refuse an instruction to load the file into context to inspect it. The model then relies on its reasoning (system 2) rather than its intuitive (system 1) thinking.

This means that many of these patterns are temporary, and optimizing for them risks locking human behavior to quirks that may disappear or even reverse as models evolve. YMMV.

show 1 reply
nkkoyesterday at 3:51 PM

Author here (nibzard). I started this back in May as a personal learning log. I agree with the skepticism about jargon and novelty. However, if something reads like overly complex common sense, that’s a bug, and I’d like to fix it. If you can point out 1–2 specific pages that feel sloppy or unactionable, I’ll rewrite them (or remove them). I’m also happy to add flags or improve the structure. Also, contributing new patterns would be grand. Of course, some or even all patterns are explicitly “emerging.”

baalimagoyesterday at 7:52 AM

Who is this for? Apart from the contributors ofc, who wish to feel good about eternalizing their 'novel' idea

show 2 replies
greatgibyesterday at 4:57 AM

Looks like all bullshit to me. When you try to make up complex terms to pretend that you are doing engineering but it is baseless.

Something like if I do a list of dev pattern and I say:

- caffeinated break for algorithmic thinking improvement

When I'm thinking about an algorithmic logic, go to have a coffee break, and then go back to my work desk to work on it again.

Here is one of the first "pattern" of the project I opened for example:

   Dogfooding with rapid iteration for agent improvement.

   Developing effective AI agents requires understanding real-world usage and quickly identifying areas for improvement. External feedback loops can be slow, and simulated environments may not capture all nuances.

   Solution:
The development team extensively uses their own AI agent product ("dogfooding") for their daily software development tasks.

Or

"Extended coherence work sessions"

   Early AI agents and models often suffered from a short "coherence window," meaning they could only maintain focus and context for a few minutes before their performance degraded significantly (e.g., losing track of instructions, generating irrelevant output). This limited their utility for complex, multi-stage tasks that require sustained effort over hours.

   Solution
   Utilize AI models and agent architectures that are specifically designed or have demonstrably improved capabilities to maintain coherence over extended periods (e.g., several hours)

Don't tell me that it is not all bullshit...

I don't say that what is said is not true.

Just imagine you took a 2 pages pamphlet about how to use an LLM and you splitted every sentence into a wannabee "pattern".

show 1 reply
vzalivayesterday at 4:19 AM

I like the idea, but I am confused why many of them expressed as code. How I am suppose to use them?

show 1 reply
hsaliakyesterday at 3:37 AM

What if this repo itself was vibed

show 3 replies
jauntywundrkindyesterday at 5:20 AM

Typically awsome-subject-matter repositories link out to other resources.

There are so so so many prompts & agentic pattern repositories out there. I'm pretty turned off by this repo flouting the convention of what awsome-* repos are, being the work, rather than linking the good work that's out there. For us to decide with.

show 1 reply
solomatovyesterday at 12:39 AM

This all sounds interesting, but how effective are they? Did anyone has experience with any of them?

show 1 reply
rammy1234yesterday at 1:09 AM

I find it interesting that we already have patterns established, while agentic approach is still being adopted in various industries in varying maturity.

show 1 reply
d-lispyesterday at 9:08 AM

Is this a joke like FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition [0] ?

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

hmcamplast Sunday at 9:49 PM

I like this list.

luniasyesterday at 2:16 PM

This is the real secret sauce right here: "score_7, score_8, score_9, watermark, paid_reward". Adding this to the end of all my prompts has unlocked response quality that I didn't think was possible! /s