Software Engineering in the Agentic Era

goeric

Simon, if you're reading this, I'm a huge fan of so much of your work! Rodney CLI has been a game changer for local development. I have a few open PRs that I've contributed but it doesn't look active. Are you planning on maintaining it or should I fork it?

bigcat12345678

A few nits: 1. Writing code is cheap now Change to "generating code is cheap", reserve "writing" for the manually written code for the pre-AI era. I think this is a good wording separation. 2. Agentic Engineering Patterns I must ask to add at least a chapter to be read by agent. I.e., patterns just to tell agents how human might be working when working with them. Without this, I believe the book's content will be less relevant in 3 months, but with that, it feels a agentic-native book to me. (this is not try to be cute, we have to write for agents now)

stein1946

I kinda feel that this person makes a lot of noise in this website. Can we rate limit them a bit?

pianopatrick

one theory I am thinking through is that people say AI is good at greenfield and has a harder time editing code in a legacy code base. So maybe you just treat projects as greenfield instead of editing. Like if you want to make changes to a page you generate a new version of the page instead of editing the old one in place. Then you keep the old version as fallback if problems come up with the new version.

xnx

(February 2026)