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What is agentic engineering?

simonwillison.net

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Re: What is agentic engineering?

#51

Post by simonw »

Eufrat wrote: post #47
simonw wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

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…

My best guess is that the hype around the tooling has given the false impression that it's easy to use - which leads to disappointment when people try it and don't get exactly what they wanted after their first prompt.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#52

Post by daemonologist »

P-MATRIX wrote: post #50

The 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.

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Re: What is agentic engineering?

#53

Post by Eufrat »

simonw wrote: post #51
Eufrat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My best guess is that the hype around the tooling has given the false impression that it's easy to use - which leads to disappointment when people try it and don't get exactly what they wanted after their first prompt.

I think you and a lot of people have spent a lot of energy getting as much out of these models as you can and I think that’s great, but I agree that it’s not what they’re being sold as and there is plenty of space for people to treat these tools more conservatively. The idea that is being paraded around is that you can prompt the AI and the black box will yield a fully compliant, secure and robust product.

Rationality has long since gone out of the window with this and I think that’s sorta the problem. People who don’t understand these tools see them as a way to just get rid of noisome people. The fact that you need to spend a fair amount of money, fiddle with them by cajoling them with AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, FOO.md, etc. and then having enough domain experience to actually know when they’re wrong.

I can see the justification for a small person shop spending the time and energy to give it a try, provided the long-term economics of these models makes them cost-effective and the model is able to be coerced into working well for their specific situation. But we simply do not know and I strongly suspect there’s been too much money dumped into Anthropic and friends for this to be an acceptable answer right now as illustrated by the fact that we are seeing OKRs where people are being forced to answer loaded questions about how AI tooling has improved their work.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#54

Post by erklik »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #44
simonw wrote: post #38

Earlier 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...

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.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#56

Post by esafak »

skydhash wrote: post #30
maxbond wrote: post #8

I 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.

My preferred definition of software engineering is found in the first chapter of Modern Software Engineering by David Farley Software engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economic solutions to practical problems in software. As for the practitioner, he said that they: …must become experts at learning and experts at managing complexity For the learning part, that me…

You can do these things with AI, especially if you start off with a repo that demonstrates how, for the agent to imitate. I do suggest collaborating with the agent on a plan first.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#57

Post by jfim »

ares623 wrote: post #15
neonbrain wrote: post #14

The term feels broken when adhering to standard naming conventions, such as Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering, where "Agentic Engineering" would logically refer to the engineering of agents

Agentic Management doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

That's kind of how it feels though. I get the impression I'm micro managing various Claude code instances in multiple terminals.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#58

Post by AdieuToLogic »

simonw wrote: post #46
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #44

Earlier 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...

You appear to be confusing "produce working code" with "exclusively produce working code".

> 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 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).
It appears to me that "Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services" desires producing working code and has identified the ramifications of not producing same.

Re: What is agentic engineering?

#59

Post by iainctduncan »

kypro wrote: post #45
iainctduncan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

My money is on a lot more than 1 to 2!
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