Coding has always had heroes, rockstars, ninjas, and more recently the mythical 10x engineer. But something’s changed. When AI now drafts your PR, answers your linter, and scaffolds your microservice before your coffee even cools, brute-force speed isn’t special anymore. Decision-making is. Engineers aren’t being replaced; they’re being repositioned, augmented. And not by job title, but by behaviour. That’s the agentic engineer. And now about this…
Agentic Engineer; lets talk about it! Three behaviours define them. None involve semicolons.
First: they think like product people. Not in a PM cosplay kind of way, but in knowing how their commits map to company goals. Whether it’s reducing churn, shaving latency, or unlocking a partner integration, agentic engineers speak in outcomes, not outputs.
Second: they’ve got curiosity wired into their workflow. They trace the edge cases, follow the data dependencies, and treat the codebase like a living organism. Not every file is theirs, but every file is fair game.
Third: they don’t wait for permission to prototype. Yes, they write the documentation when it counts. Yes, they loop in stakeholders. But if they smell opportunity, they build. Even if it means creating a throwaway branch and shipping a ghost feature behind a flag, just to see what’s possible.
So breaking down the analogies! Why does this matter?
Well, this kind of initiative can make systems groan. Especially in companies where alignment comes via memo, and initiative gets mistaken for going rogue. You want engineers to be agentic? You have to meet them halfway. That means publishing KPIs like they’re changelogs, granting repo access like it’s oxygen, and making your planning cycles less… medieval.
Otherwise, you’re asking for outcomes while handing out blindfolds. There’s also the process tax. Document-driven design, RFCs, multi-stage reviews, they keep things clean, but they can also kill momentum. Agentic engineers work through these processes, not around them. Some teams embrace that, like giving everyone an “experimental” folder for wild builds. Others? Still stuck in ticket purgatory.
But what about the trade-offs, you ask?
Agentic culture breeds velocity, but it needs friction in the right places. Think commit gates, not approval limbo. Think observability, not surveillance. Too little structure and you get chaos. Too much and the builders check out. And let’s not forget equity. Not every engineer has the same access, support, or air cover to be agentic. Early-career developers can’t magic up strategy if leadership keeps it siloed. So, if you want more agentic engineers, train fewer passive ones. Start by sharing the “why” more than the “what”.
So… what does this all mean for your team? It means that hiring for skills is only half the job. You also need to design for agency. Can someone act on their instincts? Will they be heard when they do? Does your infrastructure help people move or just monitor them? Because we’re no longer in the era of who-can-code-the-fastest. We’re in the era of who-can-move-the-smartest.
Bottom line?: Answer three questions: Do your engineers know why their work matters? Can they change the plan when they find a better one? And lastly, do you make it easy for them to start building—or just easy to stop? If you want agentic engineers, start by acting like an agentic organisation. Strip the noise, show the goals, and then get out of the way. The right people will fill the gap. See you in the next one.
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