# Agentic engineering

- Page: https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/topics/agentic-engineering
- Updated: 2026-11-02

Agentic engineering is building software by directing AI coding agents instead of writing the code yourself. The engineer decides what to build, splits the work into tracks, defines what done means and reviews what gets merged. The agents write the code, test it and review each other's pull requests.

Andrej Karpathy [proposed the name](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2019137879310836075) on February 4, 2026, a year after he coined "vibe coding", to separate professional work with agents from throwaway experiments. "Agentic", because most of the time you orchestrate agents and act as oversight. "Engineering", because it is expertise you can learn and get better at. His goal: the gains agents bring "without any compromise on the quality of the software."

Agents do not remove judgment: once they do the typing, human attention is the scarce resource.

At The Agile Monkeys, an AI engineering studio, we teach it in Agentic Engineering 101, a free English course that opened on October 30, 2026. Eleven modules go from one agent used well to twenty sessions in parallel.

## Start with the free course

Module 00 plays the whole game in 45 minutes: plan, build, parallelize and review a real change.

- [Agentic Engineering 101](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/courses/agentic-engineering-101) (2026-10-16): Be the GOAT… or farm the goats. A free course on building software with many AI agents. Elon Musk replied to the launch video: “Good one.”

## What we learned working this way

- [Agentic Engineering: Be a Supreme Whisperer](https://labs.theagilemonkeys.com/posts/agentic-engineering-be-a-supreme-whisperer/) (2026-10-29): Get more out of Codex and Claude Code with bigger goals, thinking out loud, connected context, and a daily workflow that frees up attention.
- [Our job was never translating requests into code](https://labs.theagilemonkeys.com/posts/our-job-was-never-translating-requests-into-code/) (2026-10-26): Once agents write the code, what is left is what the job always was: solving the problem with what is available, and knowing the constraints.
- [Engineers finally have time for the problems nobody could prioritize](https://labs.theagilemonkeys.com/posts/engineers-finally-have-time-for-the-problems-nobody-could-prioritize/) (2026-10-09): Writing and reviewing code lose value. Problem solving, our own tooling and knowing the rules of the game gain it.

## The tools we built for it

- [Shepherdr](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/open-source/repo-shepherdr) (2026-10-22): A native macOS console for herding your coding agents across Herdr machines.
- [Shepherdr: One Crook to Herd Them All](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/videos/shepherdr-one-crook-to-herd-them-all) (2026-10-22): A native macOS console for herding your coding agents, on every machine you run, in one queue. Free and open source (MIT). Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, opencode and friends in one prioritized queue: th
- [Claude Dev Kit](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/open-source/repo-claude-dev-kit) (2026-09-28): Open source, stack-agnostic issue-to-PR workflow plugin for Claude Code: quality gates, tracker and PR-host adapters.

## What is left for the engineer

Conversations from inside the team, in Spanish.

- [Open Kitchen #1: The AI with the Best Human](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/videos/open-kitchen-1-the-ai-with-the-best-human) (2026-10-15): Open Kitchen lets you into our internal meetings: no script, only what was actually said. In #1, Javier Toledo (CTO), Álvaro López (Lead Dev), Jaime López (CEO) and Adrián Lorenzo (CRO) ask what the e
- [AI Engineering: The Engineer's Job Was Never the Code](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/videos/ai-engineering-nunca-fue-el-codigo) (2026-09-30): If AI already writes good code, what is left for the engineer? Flavia Marsano, AI Lead, asks Adrián Lorenzo (CRO) and Álvaro López Espinosa what they see for the engineer's role over the next five yea
- [AI Engineering: From Code to Judgment](https://hub.theagilemonkeys.com/videos/ai-engineering-del-codigo-al-criterio) (2026-10-06): Which skills does an engineer need once AI writes and reviews the code? Adrián Lorenzo and Álvaro López answer. In Spanish.