That’s not what I meant. What I’m asking is whether there’s any evidence that the latest “techniques” (such as Ralph) can actually lead to high quality results both in terms of code and end product, and if so, how.

I used Ralph recently, in Claude Code. We had a complex SQL script that was crunched large amounts of data and was slow to run even on tables that are normalized, have indexes for the right columns etc. We, the humans spent significant amount of time tweaking it. We were able to get some performance gains, but eventually hit a wall. That is when I let Ralph take a stab at it. I told it to create a baseline benchmark and I gave it the expected output. I told to keep iterating on the script until there was at least 3x improvement in performance number while the output was identical. I set the iteration limit to 50. I let it loose and went to dinner. When I came back, it had found a way to get 3x performance and stopped on the 20th iteration.

Is there another human that could get me even better performance given the same parameters. Probably yes. In the same amount of time? Maybe, but unlikely. In any case, we don't have anybody on our team that can think of 20 different ways to improve a large and complex SQL script and try them all in a short amount of time.

These tools do require two things before you can expect good results:

1. An open mind. 2. Experience. Lots of it.

BTW, I never trust the code an AI agent spits out. I get other AI agents, different LLMs, to review all work, create deterministic tests that must be run and must pass before the PR is ever generated. I used to do a lot of this manually. But now I create Claude skills that automate a lot of this away.

I don't understand what kind of evidence you expect to receive.

There are plenty of examples from talented individuals, like Antirez or Simonw, and an ocean of examples from random individuals online.

I can say to you that some tasks that would take me a day to complete are done in 2h of agentic coding and 1h of code review, with the additional feature that during the 2h of agenti coding I can do something else. Is this the kind of evidence you are looking for?