Agentic Engineering
Engineering with AI coding agentsThe essays, talks, and guides that defined agentic engineering — the discipline of building real software with AI coding agents, one step past vibe coding.
“From a viral shorthand to an engineering discipline: how 'accept the diff and hope' became patterns, harnesses, and orchestrated agent fleets in under two years.”
About this vault
A curated map of how 'vibe coding' became 'agentic engineering.' The trail runs from Karpathy's original February 2025 post and Willison's line-drawing response, through the demystification essays (Thorsten Ball's 300-line agent) and the vendor playbooks (Anthropic's workflow-vs-agent vocabulary, OpenAI's orchestration guide), to the 2026 professionalization: Willison's patterns guide, Böckeler's harness engineering, and Yegge's agent-fleet maximalism. Selection standard: primary sources and first-hand practitioner writing only — no explainers of explainers. The deepest running disagreement to watch: Yegge argues the future is orchestrating colonies of agents; Willison argues the craft is disciplined single-agent practice with tests and review. Both are in here; read them against each other.
15 articles
Start Here
Three pieces that define the term and the debate: the talk that named it, the guide that defined it, and the essay that drew the original line.
Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Karpathy revisits his own 'vibe coding' coinage a year later and argues that agentic engineering is the serious discipline forming on top of it: you can outsource the typing and even much of the thinking, but never the understanding.
Agentic Engineering Patterns
An evolving, chaptered guide to the coding practices that get the best results from agents: red/green TDD, linear walkthroughs, hoarding reusable playbooks — plus the field's most-cited working definition of the term itself.
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
The essay that drew the line: vibe coding — accepting output unreviewed — is fine for throwaway projects, but professional software still requires review, tests, and comprehension. The conceptual seed of agentic engineering.
The Practice: Patterns, Harnesses, Context
The working engineer's shelf: how agents actually work, what feeds them, and the harness that makes their output trustworthy.
How to Build an Agent (or: The Emperor Has No Clothes)
A working code-editing agent in about 300 lines of Go with three tools — demonstrating that the core loop behind coding agents is genuinely simple, and the sophistication lives in the harness.
Harness engineering for coding agent users
Agent = Model + Harness. Böckeler's framework separates guides (feedforward controls that prevent problems) from sensors (feedback controls that catch them) as the path to trusting agent-generated code.
Building Effective AI Agents
The essay that gave the field its working vocabulary: workflows (predefined LLM+tool paths) versus agents (LLMs that direct their own process), and the case for the simplest pattern that solves the problem.
Effective Context Engineering for AI Agents
The essay that mainstreamed 'context engineering': treating the agent's full token budget — system prompt, tools, retrieved data, history — as a finite resource with diminishing returns, managed via compaction and just-in-time retrieval.
Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents
Flask creator Armin Ronacher's field notes on agent-driven development: which languages and tool choices reduce agent confusion, how to manage context, and real examples from CI debugging to workflow automation.
A Practical Guide to Building Agents
OpenAI's 34-page guide distilled from enterprise deployments: when an agent is actually warranted, single- versus multi-agent orchestration patterns, and guardrail design for safe deployment.
The Debate: Fleets vs Craft
Yegge's agent-colony maximalism versus Willison's disciplined craft — the live disagreement that will define the next two years.
The Future of Coding Agents
Yegge argues development is shifting from one powerful agent to orchestrated colonies of coding agents, and predicts small teams running agent fleets will outpace much larger organizations.
Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond
The first book-length treatment of building real software with AI agents. Kim and Yegge introduce the FAAFO framework — Fast, Ambitious, Autonomous, Fun, Optionality — for professional-grade AI-assisted development.
From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge
Yegge lays out his levels-of-adoption framework — from ignoring AI to running parallel agent fleets — and argues monolithic codebases are the biggest blocker to enterprise agent adoption.
My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit
Willison and Statsig's Eric Lui walk through the phases developers actually go through when adopting AI coding tools, why sandboxing coding agents matters, and how test-driven development changes when an agent writes the tests.
Origins & Context
The primary sources: the post that coined vibe coding and the Software 3.0 frame everything else builds on.
There's a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding” (original post)
The origin post that coined 'vibe coding' — fully giving in to the vibes, forgetting the code exists — and the etymological root of the entire term family, agentic engineering included.
Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)
The Software 3.0 talk: hand-written code (1.0), learned weights (2.0), natural-language prompts (3.0) — and the prediction of a coming 'decade of agents.'
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Frequently asked questions
Who is Agentic Engineering?
Agentic Engineering is covered in this Burn 451 vault with a focus on engineering with ai coding agents. The essays, talks, and guides that defined agentic engineering — the discipline of building real software with AI coding agents, one step past vibe coding.
How was the Agentic Engineering vault curated?
The Agentic Engineering vault was hand-curated by the Burn 451 editorial team from publicly available essays, blog posts, podcast transcripts, and social threads. Each piece includes an AI-generated summary so readers can triage in seconds. The vault auto-syncs as new content from Agentic Engineering is published.
How many articles are in the Agentic Engineering vault?
The Agentic Engineering vault currently contains 15 curated pieces organized by topic, not chronology. Each article has an AI summary and a direct link to the original source. Items are refreshed hourly through Burn 451's ISR pipeline, so new publications appear within a day.
How do I use this vault with Claude or Cursor?
Install the burn-mcp-server package from npm and connect it to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI tool. The vault becomes queryable as live context — your AI can search, summarize, and cite articles from Agentic Engineering directly in conversation without manual copy-paste or re-uploading files.
What is Burn 451?
Burn 451 is a read-later app built around a 24-hour burn timer that forces daily triage. Articles you save must be read, vaulted, or released within 24 hours. The Vault layer — including this Agentic Engineering collection — holds permanent curated reading lists for AI thought leaders, founders, and researchers.
Content attributed to original authors. Burn 451 curates publicly available writing as a reading index. For removal requests, contact @hawking520.