High-Quality Software Engineering With Agents

Use this module when you are moving beyond a quick prototype and asking an agent to build software that you expect to keep, share, or depend on.

Coding agents can produce changes faster than you can inspect them. Without a clear process, that speed can create code that appears to work but is difficult to understand, verify, or safely change.

High-quality agentic engineering means remaining accountable for the result. It means planning before implementation, testing and reviewing what the agent produces, and using feedback loops that help it correct mistakes. It also means saving what each project teaches you as documentation, tools, and reusable skills. The goal is software that works now and a process that makes the next change easier.

Starting Points

  1. Begin with Simon Willison’s Vibe engineering. It separates careless code generation from professional work with agents. Look for the established engineering practices that become more important, not less important, when code is cheap to produce.

  2. Read Compound Engineering. Its cycle—plan, work, review, and compound—covers the full software development process with agents. The final step matters most: save what the project taught you so the next task starts with better instructions, tools, tests, or documentation.

  3. Meet three toolkits through the essays that explain how their creators use them:

    Each toolkit turns practices such as planning, debugging, testing, review, and verification into reusable skills that help an agent stay on track.

Deep Dive