Guides > Agentic Engineering Patterns
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full day or more. Many of our engineering habits, at both the macro and micro level, are built around this core constraint.
At the macro level we spend a great deal of time designing, estimating and planning out projects, to ensure that our expensive coding time is spent as efficiently as possible. Product feature ideas are evaluated in terms of how much value they can provide in exchange for that time - a feature needs to earn its development costs many times over to be worthwhile!
At the micro level we make hundreds of decisions a day predicated on available time and anticipated tradeoffs. Should I refactor that function to be slightly more elegant if it adds an extra hour of coding time? How about writing documentation? Is it worth adding a test for this edge case? Can I justify building a debug interface for this?
Coding agents dramatically drop the cost of typing code into the computer, which disrupts so many of our existing personal and organizational intuitions about which trade-offs make sense.
The ability to run parallel agents makes this even harder to evaluate, since one human engineer can now be implementing, refactoring, testing and documenting code in multiple places at the same time.
Good code still has a cost
Delivering new code has dropped in price to almost free... but delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than that.
Here's what I mean by "good code":
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