Agentic Engineering

Overview

Agentic Engineering is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy to describe the engineering discipline of coordinating AI agents to produce professional-quality software without sacrificing the quality bar. Where "vibe coding" raises the floor — enabling anyone to build software through natural-language interaction with LLMs — agentic engineering preserves the ceiling: security, reliability, and architectural integrity at production scale.

The discipline centers on a core tension: agents are "spiky entities" — stochastic, fallible, and capable of subtle architectural mistakes (like matching users by email address instead of persistent IDs) — but they are also extraordinarily powerful when directed well. Agentic engineering is the practice of resolving this tension through taste, judgment, spec design, and oversight. Karpathy argues the productivity multiplier for skilled agentic engineers far exceeds the traditional "10x engineer" benchmark, but that the skill ceiling is very high.