"Prompt" was derogatory /s

Prompt engineering was coined before tooling like Claude Code existed, when everyone copied and pasted from chatgpt to their editor and back.

Agentic coding highlights letting the model directly code on your codebase. I guess its the next level forward.

I keep seeing agentic engineering more even in job postings, so I think this will be the terminology used to describe someone building software whilst letting an AI model output the code. Its not to be confused with vibe coding which is possible with coding agents.

Prompt engineering didn't imply coding agents. That's the big difference: we are now using tools write and execute the code, which makes for massively more useful results.

I think prompt engineering is obsolete at this point, partly because it's very hard to do better than just directly stating what you want. Asking for too much tone modification, role-playing or output structuring from LLMs very clearly degrades the quality of the output.

"Prompt engineering" is a relic of the early hypothesis that how you talk to the LLM is gonna matter a lot.

I agree, partly. I feel the main goal of the term “agentic engineering” is to distinguish the new technique of software engineering from “Vibe Coding.” Many felt vibe coding insinuated you didn’t know what you were doing; that you weren’t _engineering_.

In other words, “Agentic engineering” feels like the response of engineers who use AI to write code, but want to maintain the skill distinction to the pure “vibe coders.”

Yeah, I see agentic engineering as a sub-field or a technique within software engineering.

I entirely agree that engineering practices still matter. It has been fascinating to watch how so many of the techniques associated with high-quality software engineering - automated tests and linting and clear documentation and CI and CD and cleanly factored code and so on - turn out to help coding agents produce better results as well.

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 means

  Iteration
  Feedback
  Incrementalism
  Experimentation
  Empiricism

For the complexity part, that means

  Modularity
  Cohesion
  Separation of Concerns
  Abstraction
  Loose Coupling

Anyone that advocates for agentic engineering has been very silent about the above points. Even for the very first definition, it seems that we’re no longer seeking to solve practical problems, nor proposing economical solutions for them.

And we haven't even started to see the security ramifications... my money is on the black hats in this race.

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?

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

I think “agent engineering” could refer to the latter, if a distinction needs to be made. I do get what you’re saying, but when I heard the term, I personally understood its meaning.

Yeah, Armin Ronacher has been calling it "agentic coding" which does at least make it clear that it's not a general engineering thing, but specifically a code related thing.

I decided to go with it after z.AI used it in their GLM-5 announcement: https://z.ai/blog/glm-5 - I figured if the Chinese AI labs have picked it up that's a good sign it's broken out.

Thanks for the reminder, I should add a note about vibe coding to this piece.

Honestly? I've been playing with using LLMs specifically for that reason. I'm far more likely to make prototypes that I specifically intend to throw away during the development process.

I try out ideas that are intended to explore some small aspect of a concept, and just ask the LLM to generate the rest of whatever scaffold is needed to verify the part that I'm interested in. Or use an LLM to generate just a roughest MVP prototype you could imagine, and start using it immediately to calibrate my initial intuition about the problem space. Eventually you get to the point where you've tried out your top 3-5 ideas for each different corner of your codebase, and you can really nail down your spec and then its off to the races building your "real" version.

I have a mechanical engineering background, so I'm quite used to the concept of destructive validation testing. As soon as I made that connection while exploring a new idea via claude code, it all started feeling much more natural. Now my coding process is far more similar to my old physical product design process than I'd ever imagined it could be.

I find it quite useful to work out, plan, and refine ideas with agents. An agents ability to call out approaches you haven't thought of is really powerful. I find it useful to steer their feedback and proposals to the exact constraints you have or give yourself a confidence check on if you are leaning toward a solution for the right reasons. The best is when you can test 2-3 avenues and being able to come back and evaluate the results. Normally you would commit to one and spend all your time on that approach, make an assessment it was bad enough to try something else and move on. I find agents completely flip the script on research and planning. I find I am better able to work on hard problems then ever before with these tools. I think people severely limit themselves if they are only using them at the "build it" phase.

If you haven't seen coding agents produce working code you've not been paying attention for the past 3-12 months.

  Amazon orders 90-day reset after code mishaps cause
  millions of lost orders[0]