Levels of Agentic Engineering

sjkoelle

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.

smy20011

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.

efsavage

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.

politelemon

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.

eikenberry

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.

mzg

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)

measurablefunc

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

jjmarr

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".

ftkftk

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.

jackby03

Good taxonomy. One thing missing from most discussions at these levels is how agents discover project context — most tools still rely on vendor-specific files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules). Would love to see standardization at that layer too.

nimasadri11

I really like your post and agree with most things. The one thing I am not fully sure about: > Look at your app, describe a sequence of changes out loud, and watch them happen in front of you. The problem a lot of times is that either you don't know what you want, or you can't communicate it (and usually you can't communicate it properly because you don't know exactly what you want). I think this is going to be the bottleneck very soon (for some people, it is already the bottleneck). I am curious what are your thoughts about this? Where do you see that going, and how do you think we can prepare for that and address that. Or do you not see that to be an issue?

ramesh31

>(Re: level 8) "...I honestly don't think the models are ready for this level of autonomy for most tasks. And even if they were smart enough, they're still too slow and too token-hungry for it to be economical outside of moonshot projects like compilers and browser builds (impressive, but far from clean)." This is increasingly untrue with Opus 4.6. Claude Max gives you enough tokens to run ~5-10 agents continuously, and I'm doing all of my work with agent teams now. Token usage is up 10x or more, but the results are infinitely better and faster. Multi-agent team orchestration will be to 2026 what agents were to 2025. Much of the OP article feels 3-6 months behind the times.

C0ldSmi1e

One of the best article I've read recently.

dolebirchwood

> Voice-to-voice (thought-to-thought, maybe?) interaction with your coding agent — conversational Claude Code, not just voice-to-text input — is a natural next step. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the appeal in verbal dictation, especially where complexity is involved. I want to think through issues deliberately, carefully, and slowly to ensure I'm not glossing over subtle nuances. I don't find speaking to be conducive to that. For me, the process of writing (and rewriting) gives me the time, space, and structure to more precisely articulate what I want with a more heightened degree of specificity. Being able to type at 80+ wpm probably helps as well.

vidimitrov

Level 4 is where I see the most interesting design decisions get made, and also where most practitioners take a shortcut that compounds badly later. When the author talks about "codifying" lessons, the instinct for most people is to update the rules file. That works fine for conventions - naming patterns, library preferences, relatively stable stuff. But there's a different category of knowledge that rules files handle poorly: the why behind decisions. Not what approach was chosen, but what was rejected and why the tradeoff landed where it did. "Never use GraphQL for this service" is a useful rule to have in CLAUDE.md. What's not there: that GraphQL was actually evaluated, got pretty far into prototyping, and was abandoned because the caching layer had been specifically tuned for REST response shapes, and the cost of changing that was higher than the benefit for the team's current scale. The agent follows the rule. It can't tell when the rule is no longer load-bearing. The place where this reasoning fits most naturally is git history - decisions and rejections captured in commit messages, versioned alongside the code they apply to. Good engineers have always done this informally. The discipline to do it consistently enough that agents can actually retrieve and use it is what's missing, and structuring it for that purpose is genuinely underexplored territory. At level 7, this matters more than people expect. Background agents running across sessions with no human-in-the-loop have nothing to draw on except whatever was written down. A stale rules file in that context doesn't just cause mistakes - it produces confident mistakes.

holtkam2

Level 9: agent managers running agent teams Level 10: agent CEOs overseeing agent managers Level 11: agent board of directors overseeing the agent CEO Level 12: agent superintelligence - single entity doing everything Level 13: agent superagent, agenting agency agentically, in a loop, recursively, mega agent, agentic agent agent agency super AGI agent Level 14: A G E N T

CuriouslyC

The thing blocking level 8 isn't the difficulty of orchestration, it's the cost of validation. The quality of your software is a function of the amount of time you've spent validating it, and if you produce 100x more code in a given time frame, that code is going to get 1/100th as much validation, and your product will be lower quality as a result. Spec driven development can reduce the amount of re-implementation that is required due to requirements errors, but we need faster validation cycles. I wrote a rant about this topic: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-01-27-stop-orchestrating...

Aperocky

The steps are small at the front and huge on the bottom, and carries a lot of opinions on the last 2 steps (but specifically on step 7) That's a smell for where the author and maybe even the industry is. Agents don't have any purpose or drive like human do, they are probabilistic machines, so eventually they are limited by the amount of finite information they carry. Maybe that's what's blocking level 8, or blocking it from working like a large human organization.

Arainach

> If your repo requires a colleague's approval before merge, and that colleague is on level 2, still manually reviewing PRs, that stifles your throughput. So it is in your best interest to pull your team up. Until you build an AI oncaller to handle customer issues in the middle of the night (and depending on your product an AI who can be fired if customer data is corrupted/lost), no team should be willing to remove the "human reviews code step. For a real product with real users, stability is vastly more important than individual IC velocity. Stability is what enables TEAM velocity and user trust.

bigwheels

Levels 7 and 8 sounds a lot like the StrongDM AI Dark Software Factory published last month: https://factory.strongdm.ai/techniques Techniques covered in-depth + Attractor open source implementations: https://factory.strongdm.ai/products/attractor#community https://github.com/search?q=strongdm+attractor&type=reposito ... https://github.com/strongdm/attractor/forks I'm continuing to study and refine my approach to leverage all this.