Agentic Engineering

At the start of 2025 I was optimistic about how AI will change how we produce software. I had had I somewhat eye-opening experience with Replit in the end of 2024; building fullstack applications, just by prompting. But at that time, it was “only for prototyping” and all in all the Replit experience, though awesome, did not match the software development and teamwork processes and lifecycle I had grown accustomed to a decade earlier.

Replit, and later Lovable, have still been my goto prototyping tools and services I use to help people vibe code. And “vibe coding” was only coined in less than a year ago!

Enter Cursor. I did some AI-assisted development with it in the Spring time. Never going vanilla again, I told myself. But the experience was a bit frustrating. At times whatever model Cursor was using, I got superb result. Sometimes, though, I was ignoring it and figuring stuff out via traditional IDE autocomplete and debugging.

Claude Code release came and went. I burned through all the intro credits trying to Dockerize an application I never got running.

Claude Code #

A few months later Claude Code was included in the Pro subscription. For 20 bucks a month you could use it kind of indefinitely. At least play around with it. Generally, for me, it meant an hour here and an hour there. It was summer vacation time and I didn’t really have much more time.

Still, I was amazed.

I built a fully featured fullstack application with video merging and management, real time chat, user management, ACLs, dependency visualisations, etc. OK, I could’ve done that in Replit I thought. I must host this thing!

Turns out Claude Code can set up your whole cloud environment. And optimise it! I know the cool kids use Github Actions these days, hmm, who don’t you Claude go ahead and implement that for me!

And with that, a generalist like me is able to delegate the work I have no deep eperience nor the patience to learn at this point.

I become an orchestrator of AIs. I allocate AI resources. I am an not a programmer. I am an agentic engineer. AI-first development? Agentic development? The terms have not standardised, and I don’t know if they have time to.

There’s a post full of stuff to write about Claude Code itself. Agents, skills, MCPs, command, the UI and the effectiveness of the “harness” around the LLM.

The UI, though, I must say I never expected to be running command line tools in 2025. No more IDEs, just good old sublime text to edit config and .md files.

The change of software development #

All this will of course change how we develop software in the future. For some of us it changed in 2025. Programming is commoditized. Almost free.

Luckily, very few of software developers are merely programmers - they do specs, coordination, architecture, planning, migrations, version control, communication and transforming other people’s ideas into business logic. Most of this work will become more important. Roles will blend; designers, developers, product managers, each of them can leverage AI to do each others work. We will make do with smaller teams, meaning less coordination headwinds, meaning less overhead!

I bet some can’t take this change. Code is art and craftsmanship to some. AI is “just predicting next words”. In the end I believe not writing code hits some hard because doing it is an identity issue. Letting go of that is hard.

Vibes for 2026 #

For myself, I docked that fullstack application for non-AI reasons. I thought, why would I want to be doing the web forms and APIs and databases if I have a godlike programmer at my side?

So I’m doing game development for laughs. Fully vibing it, if it means not looking at the code. But not really because I’m doing all the aforementioned managerial stuff of tickets and resource allocation and delegation. Sometimes running parallel instances, sometimes checking in on Codex for help where Claude Code can’t handle some specific issue.

So, I’m building a game that itself uses AI in its core. Speech interpretation and synthesis. LLM interpretation, regex backups. Template embeddings with cosine similarity something something.. I don’t really know, I haven’t had time to understand the whole of it. In what 2 hours-a-day game studio, does one person understand everything in detail?

I added multiplayer to it. Then I figure why not let an AI play too. So now after some hours, it has an MCP server so Claude Code can play it with me. Or against me, or any model.

Any idea can be transformed into a feature within hours.

2026? The hype train has arrived, bearing gifts.