Levels of Agentic Engineering

I coded a level 8 orchestration layer in CI for code review, two months before Claude launched theirs.

It's very powerful and agents can create dynamic microbenchmarks and evaluate what data structure to use for optimal performance, among other things.

I also have validation layers that trim hallucinations with handwritten linters.

I'd love to find people to network with. Right now this is a side project at work on top of writing test coverage for a factory. I don't have anyone to talk about this stuff with so it's sad when I see blog posts talking about "hype".

I prefer Dan Shapiro's 5 level analogy (based on car autonomy levels) because it makes for a cleaner maturity model when discussing with people who are not as deeply immersed in the current state of the art. But there are some good overall insights in this piece, and there are enough breadcrumbs to lead to further exploration, which I appreciate. I think levels 3 and 4 should be collapsed, and the real magic starts to happen after combining 5 and 6; maybe they should be merged as well.

As a lowly level 2 who remains skeptical of these software “dark factories” described at the top of this ladder, what I don’t understand is this:

If software engineering is enough of a solved problem that you can delegate it entirely to LLM agents, what part of it remains context-specific enough that it can’t be better solved by a general-purpose software factory product? In other words, if you’re a company that is using LLMs to develop non-AI software, and you’ve built a sufficient factory to generate that software, why don’t you start selling the factory instead of whatever you were selling before? It has a much higher TAM (all of software)

These are levels of gatekeeping. The items are barely related to each other. Lists like these will only promote toxicity, you should be using the tools and techniques that solve your problems and fit your comfort levels.

In my opinion there are 2 levels, human writes the code with AI assist or AI writes the code with human assist; centuar or reverse-centuar. But this article tries to focus on the evolution of the ideas and mistakenly terms them as levels (indicating a skill ladder as other commenters have noted) when they are more like stages that the AI ecosystem has evolved through. The article reads better if you think of it that way.

I will not put it into a ladder. It implies that the higher the rank, the better. However, you want to choose the best solution for your needs.

Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8.

I think eventually 4-8 will be collapsed behind a more capable layer that can handle this stuff on its own, maybe I tinker with MCP settings and granular control to minmax the process, but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry about it any more than I worry about how many threads my compiler is using.

Oceania has always been context engineering. Its been interesting to see this prioritized in the zeitgeist over the last 6 months from the "long context" zeitgeist.

What level is numeric patterns that evolve according to a sequence of arithmetic operations?