Agentic Engineering Is Just Everything We Haven't Been Doing

As always, the views here are expressly my own. In this post I'm not advocating for adopting agentic engineering. I'm assuming you chose to try it or someone decided for you. Matt Levine often writes about how crypto is rediscovering modern finance from first principles.[1] In a similar vein, when people get excited about approaches to improve agentic engineering, I can't help but think they are just talking about the practices we should already have in place as software engineers. The kind of work we typically cut because of time pressure. A classic example is using an issue tracker to organize details about the change and describe the requirements so you can hand off the work to an agent. That way the agent can comment on the issue with questions and update the status as they work. This is just normal software engineering. Some more examples: Documentation strings on methods. Descriptive pull requests. Keeping documentation up to date or even writing it in the first place. Writing…