Levels of Agentic Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#11

Post by pydry » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

mzg wrote: post #7

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is u…

I have the same question about people who sell "get rich with real estate" seminars.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#12

Post by ftkftk » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

I prefer Dan Shapiro's 5 level analogy (based on car autonomy levels) because it makes for a cleaner maturity model when discussing with people who are not as deeply immersed in the current state of the art. But there are some good overall insights in this piece, and there are enough breadcrumbs to lead to further exploration, which I appreciate. I think levels 3 and 4 should be collapsed, and the real magic starts to happen after combining 5 and 6; maybe they should be merged as well.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#13

Post by hakanderyal » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

mzg wrote: post #7

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is u…

We are not there yet. While there are teams applying dark factory models to specific domains with self-reported success, it's yet to be proven, or generalizable enough to apply everywhere.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#14

Post by jackby03 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

Good taxonomy. One thing missing from most discussions at these levels is how agents discover project context — most tools still rely on vendor-specific files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules). Would love to see standardization at that layer too.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#15

Post by dist-epoch » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

mzg wrote: post #7

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this: If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is u…

Codex and Claude Code are these (proto)factories you talk about - almost every programmer uses them now.

And when they will be fully dark factories, yes, what will happen is that a LOT of software companies will just disappear, they will be dis-intermediated by Codex/Claude Code.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#16

Post by nimasadri11 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

I really like your post and agree with most things. The one thing I am not fully sure about:

> Look at your app, describe a sequence of changes out loud, and watch them happen in front of you.

The problem a lot of times is that either you don't know what you want, or you can't communicate it (and usually you can't communicate it properly because you don't know exactly what you want). I think this is going to be the bottleneck very soon (for some people, it is already the bottleneck). I am curious what are your thoughts about this? Where do you see that going, and how do you think we can prepare for that and address that. Or do you not see that to be an issue?

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#17

Post by dist-epoch » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

eikenberry wrote: post #6

In my opinion there are 2 levels, human writes the code with AI assist or AI writes the code with human assist; centuar or reverse-centuar. But this article tries to focus on the evolution of the ideas and mistakenly terms them as levels (indicating a skill ladder as other commenters have noted) when they are more like stages that the AI ecosystem has evolved through. The article reads better if you think of it that…

There is another level - AI writes the code with AI assist.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#18

Post by ramesh31 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

>(Re: level 8) "...I honestly don't think the models are ready for this level of autonomy for most tasks. And even if they were smart enough, they're still too slow and too token-hungry for it to be economical outside of moonshot projects like compilers and browser builds (impressive, but far from clean)."

This is increasingly untrue with Opus 4.6. Claude Max gives you enough tokens to run ~5-10 agents continuously, and I'm doing all of my work with agent teams now. Token usage is up 10x or more, but the results are infinitely better and faster. Multi-agent team orchestration will be to 2026 what agents were to 2025. Much of the OP article feels 3-6 months behind the times.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#19

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #10

I coded a level 8 orchestration layer in CI for code review, two months before Claude launched theirs. It's very powerful and agents can create dynamic microbenchmarks and evaluate what data structure to use for optimal performance, among other things. I also have validation layers that trim hallucinations with handwritten linters. I'd love to find people to network with. Right now this is a side project at work on t…

[deleted]

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#20

Post by ramesh31 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

efsavage wrote: post #4

Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8. I think eventually 4-8 will be collapsed behind a more capable layer that can handle this stuff on its own, maybe I tinker with MCP settings and granular control to minmax the process, but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry about it any more than I worry about how many threads my compiler is using.

>"Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8."

I thought level 8 was a joke until Claude Code agent teams. Now I can't even imagine being limited to working with a single agent. We will be coordinating teams of hundreds by years end.