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What is agentic engineering?
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#42I think there is a meaningful distinction here. It's true that writing code has never been the sole work of a software engineer. However there is a qualitative difference between an engineer producing the code themselves and an engineer managing code generated by an LLM. When he writes there is "so much stuff" for humans to do outside of writing code I generally agree and would sum it up with one word: Accountability…
I think within the industry and practice there's going to be a renewed philosophical and psychological examination of exactly what accountability is over the next few years, and maybe some moral reckoning about it.
What makes a human a suitable source of accountability and an AI agent an unsuitable one? What is the quantity and quality of value in a "throat to choke", a human soul who is dependent on employment for income and social stature and is motivated to keep things from going wrong by threat of termination?
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#43There should be more willingness to have agents loudly fail with loud TODOs rather than try and 1 shot everything.
At the very least, agentic systems must have distinct coders and verifiers. Context rot is very real, and I've found with some modern prompting systems there are severe alignment failures (literally 2023 LLM RL levels of stubbing out and hacking tests just to get tests "passing"). It's kind of absurd.
I would rather an agent make 10 TODO's and loudly fail than make 1 silent fallback or sloppy architectural decision or outright malicious compliance.
This wouldn't work in a real company because this would devolve into office politics and drudgery. But agents don't have feelings and are excellent at synthesis. Have them generate their own (TEMPORARY) data.
Agents can be spun off to do so many experiments and create so many artifacts, and furthermore, a lot more (TEMPORARY) artifacts is ripe for analysis by other agents. Is the theory, anyways.
The effectively platonic view that we just need to keep specifying more and more formal requirements is not sustainable. Many top labs are already doing code review with AI because of code output.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#44The premise is flawed: Now that we have software that can write working code ... While there are other points made which are worth consideration on their own, it is difficult to take this post seriously given the above.
If you haven't seen coding agents produce working code you've not been paying attention for the past 3-12 months.
> 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]
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#45After three months of seeing what agentic engineering produces first-hand, I think there's going to be a pretty big correction. Not saying that AI doesn't have a place, and that models aren't getting better, but there is a seriously delusional state in this industry right now..
And we haven't even started to see the security ramifications... my money is on the black hats in this race.
We are starting to see them, also the bugs too.
But to your point I think this year it's quite likely we'll see at least 1 or 2 major AI-related security incidents..
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#46Earlier 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 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...
You appear to be confusing "produce working code" with "exclusively produce working code".
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#47The premise is flawed: Now that we have software that can write working code ... While there are other points made which are worth consideration on their own, it is difficult to take this post seriously given the above.
If you haven't seen coding agents produce working code you've not been paying attention for the past 3-12 months.
I get the impression there’s a very strong bimodal experience of these tools and I don’t consider that an endorsement of their long-term viability as they are right now. For me, I am genuinely curious why this is. If the tool was so obviously useful and a key part of the future of software engineering, I would expect it to have far more support and adoption. Instead, it feels like it works for selected use cases very well and flounders around in other situations.
This is not an attack on the tech as junk or useless, but rather that it is a useful tech within its limits being promoted as snake oil which can only end in disaster.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#48[flagged]
> Where it breaks down is any task where you discover the requirements during implementation
Often you can find these during design. Design phases felt like a waste of time when you could just start coding and find the issues as you go. Now I find it faster to do a detailed design, then hand it over to agents to code. You can front-load the hard decisions and document the plan.
Sometimes the agent might discover a real technical constraint during dev, but that's rare if the plan is detailed. If so you can always update the plan, and just restart the agent from scratch.
This is my (cheesily named) process: https://github.com/scosman/vibe-crafting
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#49I've discovered recently as code gets cheaper and more reliable to generate that having the LLM write code for new elements in response to particular queries, with context, is working well.
Kind of like these HTML demos, but more compact and card-like. Exciting the possibilities for responsive human-readable information display and wiki-like natural language exploration as models get cheaper.
Re: What is agentic engineering?
#50The skepticism makes sense to me. The core issue isn't wrong outputs—it's that there's no standard way to see what the agent was actually doing when it produced them. Without some structured view of tool call patterns, norm deviations, behavioral drift, verification stays manual and expensive. The non-determinism problem and the observability problem feel like the same problem to me.