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Levels of Agentic Engineering

bassimeledath.com

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Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#31

Post by whattheheckheck »

jessmartin wrote: post #24
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…

I got my own level 8 factory working in the last few days and it’s been exhilarating. Mine is based on OpenAI’s Symphony[1], ported to TypeScript. Would be happy to swap war stories. @gmail.com

How much money have you made with this approach

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#32

Post by whattheheckheck »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #28
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…

Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it

Too bad they cant

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#33

Post by moosehater »

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…

Do you feel like you are still learning about the programming language(s) and other technologies you are using? Or do you feel like you are already a master at them?

Do you ever take the time to validate what one of the agents produces by going to the docs? Or is all debugging/changing of the code done via LLMs/agents?

I'm more like level 2 right now and genuinely curious if you feel like learning continues for you (besides with agentic orchestration, etc.) And if not, whether or not you think that matters.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#34

Post by CuriouslyC »

The thing blocking level 8 isn't the difficulty of orchestration, it's the cost of validation. The quality of your software is a function of the amount of time you've spent validating it, and if you produce 100x more code in a given time frame, that code is going to get 1/100th as much validation, and your product will be lower quality as a result.

Spec driven development can reduce the amount of re-implementation that is required due to requirements errors, but we need faster validation cycles. I wrote a rant about this topic: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-27-stop-orchestrating...

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#35

Post by ativzzz »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #31
jessmartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my own level 8 factory working in the last few days and it’s been exhilarating. Mine is based on OpenAI’s Symphony[1], ported to TypeScript. Would be happy to swap war stories. @gmail.com

How much money have you made with this approach

I think the opposite question is more prevalent, how much money have you spent?

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#36

Post by Aperocky »

The steps are small at the front and huge on the bottom, and carries a lot of opinions on the last 2 steps (but specifically on step 7)

That's a smell for where the author and maybe even the industry is.

Agents don't have any purpose or drive like human do, they are probabilistic machines, so eventually they are limited by the amount of finite information they carry. Maybe that's what's blocking level 8, or blocking it from working like a large human organization.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#37

Post by Arainach »

> If your repo requires a colleague's approval before merge, and that colleague is on level 2, still manually reviewing PRs, that stifles your throughput. So it is in your best interest to pull your team up.

Until you build an AI oncaller to handle customer issues in the middle of the night (and depending on your product an AI who can be fired if customer data is corrupted/lost), no team should be willing to remove the "human reviews code step.

For a real product with real users, stability is vastly more important than individual IC velocity. Stability is what enables TEAM velocity and user trust.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#38

Post by antonvs »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #28
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…

Why sell the factory when you can create automated software cloner companies that make millions off of instantly copying promising startups as soon as they come out of stealth? If you could get a dark factory working when others don't have one, you can make much more money using it than however much you can make selling it

Producing the software is only a small part of the picture when it comes to generating revenue.

So far, we haven’t seen much to suggest that LLMs can (yet) replace sales and most of the related functions.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#39

Post by bigwheels »

Levels 7 and 8 sounds a lot like the StrongDM AI Dark Software Factory published last month:

https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques

Techniques covered in-depth + Attractor open source implementations:

https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor#community

https://github.com/search?q=strongdm+attractor&type=reposito...

https://github.com/strongdm/attractor/forks

I'm continuing to study and refine my approach to leverage all this.

Re: Levels of Agentic Engineering

#40

Post by quotemstr »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #31
jessmartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my own level 8 factory working in the last few days and it’s been exhilarating. Mine is based on OpenAI’s Symphony[1], ported to TypeScript. Would be happy to swap war stories. @gmail.com

How much money have you made with this approach

... is that the purpose of life? The sole reason for doing anything?
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