I agree with Simon Willison’s framing of agentic engineering as the practice of developing software with coding agents.
The important part is the engineering discipline. Agents make code cheap, but they do not make judgment cheap. You still need to know what you are trying to build, how you will verify it, and where the risky edges are.
Having a mental model helps. I like Simon’s short definition: agents run tools in a loop to achieve a goal. That explains a lot of the behavior. The agent is not magic. It is a loop that can read, write, execute, observe, and try again.
That model also makes the weak spots easier to see. If the goal is vague, the loop wanders. If the tools are missing, it guesses. If the verification is weak, it can confidently stop in the wrong place.
Your Workflow Matters
The useful work is figuring out your own workflow around that loop.
Some tasks need a careful plan first. Some need a fast prototype and a hard cleanup pass. Some need tests before the agent touches anything. Some are better split across subagents, browser checks, shell commands, and small manual reviews.
There is no universal shape for this yet. That is fine. The field is young enough that personal process still matters a lot.
Do not be afraid to experiment. Try a prompt style. Try a smaller task boundary. Try having the agent write the test first. Try giving it a failure transcript. Try asking it to explain the plan before it edits files.
Then document what worked.
That is the part I think people skip. The agent does not reliably learn from your last messy session, but your instructions, checklists, scripts, and habits can. A good workflow is accumulated evidence.
Agents As Glue
The thing I like most about coding agents is not that they can write a function.
It is that they can glue together the tedious pieces around the function. They can inspect the repo, edit the file, run the command, read the error, search the docs, adjust the code, and produce the summary. Each step is small. The integration is the value.
That makes agents especially useful for work that was previously too annoying to wire together by hand. Not impossible work. Tedious work.
The discipline is in keeping that glue visible. Make the goal clear. Keep the steps reviewable. Run the checks. Write down the pattern when it works.
Agentic engineering is not vibe coding with a better name. It is software engineering with a new execution loop.