Software Engineering in the Agentic Era

I’ve started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns —coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development we find ourselves entering.

I’m using Agentic Engineering to refer to building software using coding agents—tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, where the defining feature is that they can both generate and execute code—allowing them to test that code and iterate on it independently of turn-by-turn guidance from their human supervisor.

I think of vibe coding using its original definition of coding where you pay no attention to the code at all, which today is often associated with non-programmers using LLMs to write code.

Agentic Engineering represents the other end of the scale: professional software engineers using coding agents to improve and accelerate their work by amplifying their existing expertise.