Overview
Code generation has become cheap. Verification has not. As AI agents take on more of the development process, the bottleneck has moved from writing code to deciding what to build, directing agents to build it, and being able to answer for what ships. Drawing on Addy Osmani's experience shipping production code with agentic AI tools every day, Agentic Engineering is about how to make that shift deliberately and delegate work without giving up control.
Written for engineers already working with at least one coding agent, this guide is equally direct about the leverage and the costs: the orchestration tax, the comprehension debt, and the honest limit on how many agents one person can supervise. From individual workflow to the software factory, it's a book of durable patterns for turning faster generation into software you can trust.
- Design harnesses that give agents the right context, tools, and goals
- Write specs and skills that support reliable delegation
- Orchestrate multiagent and long-running workflows
- Build stopping conditions, evaluations, and review into the loop
- Make codebases and teams ready for agentic engineering
- Recognize the "orchestration tax" and the debts that come with speed
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