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What is agentic engineering?
101–109 of 109 posts
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#102very simple answer: it's mostly marketing fluff that embodies "2 (many) wrongs make 1 right (enough)"
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you haven't seen coding agents produce working code you've not been paying attention for the past 3-12 months. If you believe coding agents produce working code, why was the decision below made? Amazon orders 90-day reset after code mishaps cause millions of lost orders[0] 0 - https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tightens-code-control...
Good journalism would include : https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-outage-... I find it somewhat overblown. Also, I think there's a difference between working code and exceptionally bug-free code. Humans produce bugs all the time. I know I do at least.
> Good journalism would include ...
The link you provided begins with the declaration:
Written by Amazon Staff
> I find it somewhat overblown.
As I quoted in a peer comment:
Dave Treadwell, Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services, told
staff on Tuesday that a "trend of incidents" emerged since
the third quarter of 2025, including "several major"
incidents in the last few weeks, according to an internal
document obtained by Business Insider. At least one of
those disruptions were tied to Amazon's AI coding assistant
Q, while others exposed deeper issues, another internal
document explained.
Problems included what he described as "high blast radius
changes," where software updates propagated broadly because
control planes lacked suitable safeguards. (A control plane
guides how data flows across a computer network).
Do you?
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#104I don't think we should be making this distinction. We're still engaged in software engineering. This isn't a new discipline, it's a new technique. We're still using testing, requirements gathering, etc. to ensure we've produced the correct product and that the product is correct. Just with more automation.
Actually, if you defer all your coding decisions to agents, then you're not doing engineering at all. You don't say you're doing "contractor engineering" when you pay some folks to write your app for you. At that point, you are squarely in the management field.
The fact that simonw is so eager to drop the word "software" in software engineer and keep the word "engineer" reeks of ego.
You're not the engineer anymore, but you're still responsible for creating software. Why drop the most important word and keep the ego stroking word?
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, if you defer all your coding decisions to agents, then you're not doing engineering at all. You don't say you're doing "contractor engineering" when you pay some folks to write your app for you. At that point, you are squarely in the management field.
The fact that simonw is so eager to drop the word "software" in software engineer and keep the word "engineer" reeks of ego. You're not the engineer anymore, but you're still responsible for creating software. Why drop the most important word and keep the ego stroking word?
Because in order to distinguish what we are doing from vibe coding we need the word that sounds more impressive.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You appear to be confusing "produce working code" with "exclusively produce working code". The confusion is not mine own. From the article cited: Dave Treadwell, Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services, told staff on Tuesday that a "trend of incidents" emerged since the third quarter of 2025, including "several major" incidents in the last few weeks, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. At le…
That's why I'm writing a guide about how to use this stuff to produce good code.
> That's why I'm writing a guide about how to use this stuff to produce good code.
Consider the halting problem[0]:
In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem
of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer
program and an input, whether the program will finish
running, or continue to run forever. The halting problem is
undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that
solves the halting problem for all possible program–input
pairs.
Put another way, we all know "1 + 2 = 3" since elementary school. Basic math assumed everyone knows.
Imagine an environment where "1 + 2" 99% of the time results in "3", but may throw a `DivisionByZeroException`, return NaN[1], or rewrite the equation to be "PI x r x r".
Why would anyone trust that environment to reliably do what they instructed it to do?
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I'm writing a guide about how to use this stuff to produce good code.
> That's why I'm writing a guide about how to use this stuff to produce good code. Consider the halting problem[0]: In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. The halting problem is undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that solves the…
I find the challenge of using LLMs to usefully write software despite their non-deterministic nature to be interesting and deserving of study.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's why I'm writing a guide about how to use this stuff to produce good code. Consider the halting problem[0]: In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. The halting problem is undecidable, meaning that no general algorithm exists that solves the…
I find the challenge of using LLMs to usefully write software despite their non-deterministic nature to be interesting and deserving of study.
I get the appeal and respect the study you are engaging.
A meta-question I posit is; at what point does the investment in trying to get "LLMs to usefully write software despite their non-deterministic nature" become more than solving the problems at hand without using those tools?
For the purpose of the aforementioned, please assume commercial use as opposed to academic research.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good journalism would include : https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-outage-... I find it somewhat overblown. Also, I think there's a difference between working code and exceptionally bug-free code. Humans produce bugs all the time. I know I do at least.
> Good journalism would include ... The link you provided begins with the declaration: Written by Amazon Staff I am not a journalist and even I would question the "good journalism would include" assertion given the source provided. > I find it somewhat overblown. As I quoted in a peer comment: Dave Treadwell, Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services, told staff on Tuesday that a "trend of incidents" emerged since the thir…
> I am not a journalist and even I would question the "good journalism would include" assertion given the source provided.
You've misunderstood. I was saying good journalism would include both sides, and hopefully primary sources alongside the reporting, so readers can evaluate both.
> If the above is "overblown", then the SVP has done so. I have no evidence to believe this is the case however.
It says "at least one of those disruptions were tied to Amazon's AI coding assistant Q, while others exposed deeper issues." You initially cited this article as evidence that coding agents don't produce working code. But the SVP is describing a broader trend of deployment and control plane failures, most of which are classic infrastructure problems that predate AI tooling entirely. You're attributing a systemic operational failure to AI code generation when even your own source doesn't support that.
More fundamentally, your original argument was that the premise "software can write working code" is flawed. One company having incidents, where some of those incidents involved AI tooling doesn't prove that. Humans cause production incidents every single day. By your logic, the existence of any bug would prove humans can't write working code either.