Overview
Every senior engineer has experienced it: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants work brilliantly in a prototype but hit a wall when faced with a legacy codebase or a system that actually has to ship. This isn't a new problem. Scaling any kind of development requires techniques to manage complexity, maintain quality, and address tech debt. AI-driven development is no different.
Agentic Engineering at Scale by Chris Ford shows you how to use agentic coding, harness engineering, guardrails, and spec-driven development to generate robust systems of applications. Starting with the working systems you already have, it demonstrates how to continuously regenerate your production code, keeping your technology up-to-date, your users happy, and your technical debt under control.
- Evaluate whether a regenerative approach suits your codebase and organizational context
- Reverse-engineer business logic from legacy systems to establish a foundation for agentic development
- Apply harness engineering and guardrails to maintain quality at enterprise scale
- Coordinate coding-agent swarms for sustainable, high-output development workflows
- Lead adoption initiatives that bring AI coding gains from individual experiment to organizational practice
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access