Discussion

The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering

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.

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.

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.

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)

hakanderyal: We are not there yet. While there are teams applying dark factory models to specific domains with self-reported success, it's yet to be proven, or generalizable enough to apply everywhere.

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. 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.

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.

ramesh31: >"Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8."I thought level 8 was a joke until Claude Code agent teams. Now I can't even imagine being limited to working with a single agent. We will be coordinating teams of hundreds by years end.

glhast: Also a measly level 2er. I'm curious what kind of project truly needs an autonomous agent team Ralph looping out 10,000 LOCs per hour? Seems like harness-maxxing is a competitive pursuit in its own right existing outside the task of delivering software to customers.Feels like K8s cult, overly focused on the cleverness of _how_ something is built versus _what_ is being built.

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".

jessmartin: I got my own level 8 factory working in the last few days and it’s been exhilarating. Mine is based on OpenAI’s Symphony[1], ported to TypeScript.Would be happy to swap war stories.<myhnusername>@gmail.com

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.

dist-epoch: There is another level - AI writes the code with AI assist.

eikenberry: That is just another level of reverse centaur and will eventually have a human ass attached to it.

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.