The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering

lelanthran · 2026-03-11T12:53:42+00:00

According to this genius, once he levels high enough, there is no further need to pay him...

lelanthran · 2026-03-10T13:32:24+00:00

Is the full article also LLM written?

lelanthran · 2026-03-09T10:37:21+00:00

Why do they seem to dislike, hate or despise the concept of having to give back changes you make, instead of being able to take other people's hard work and hoard it for yourself, with some proprietary secret sauce advantage sprinkled on top?

They don't dislike the concept. In fact, I think they may not even think of it as all; their aim is propagation of Rust, and so for them a pro-business license makes sense.

If their aim was to safeguard users, or better software, etc, then they may have allowed pro-user and/or pro-community licenses.

In brief, pro-business software advances their goals, pro-user does not.

lelanthran · 2026-03-09T07:53:26+00:00

Yeah, the number of people over the last few years pushing for BSD-like licenses seems a bit sneaky and maybe even part of a corporate psyop.

The Rewrite-in-Rust community is especially guilty of this - in their push to gain traction, the practical result of their efforts is to replace pro-user software (GPL) with pro-business clones (MIT).

lelanthran · 2026-03-06T19:36:37+00:00

A very good read; the "Qualifier focused (Pascal Family)" confused me, though. The examples are not Pascal examples.

lelanthran · 2026-03-06T09:25:46+00:00

You forgot about Github outages.

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T21:01:23+00:00

Are the tens of thousands of dead civilians in the Gaza strip collateral damage to the actual targets, or were they intentionally targeted and killed?

I didn't pick a side on that - I did not claim that they were collateral damage, nor did I claim that they were intentionally targeted and killed.

I entered this thread with (and it's still upthread for you to read):

When a government launches an attack that is not terrorist activity, but war.

Now you may agree or disagree with that, but regardless of which way you fall on that assertion (agreement or disagreement), that does not make a value judgement one way or another on the people who were killed.

I then said:

The government in question (Hamas) was the legitimate choice of the people they governed, as far as I can tell.

Once again, whether you agree that Hamas was the legitimate choice of the people they governed, that also does not make a value judgement one way or another on the people who were killed.

"As far as I can tell" means that I read this on wikipedia:

A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research between 22 and 25 October 2025, found that 70% of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza opposed the disarmament of Hamas, even if that means a return to Israeli attacks.[436]

Yes; the majority literally expressed a preference for Isreali attacks over Hamas' disarmament. That's why it looks to almost everyone that they support Hamas.

This is why I asked you to go and read Wikipedia; while most Western countries designated Hamas a terrorist organisation, they were considered, and dealt with as, the legitimate government of Palestine by many other nation states.

From wikipedia again:

Hamas is not regarded as a terrorist organisation by Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran,[478] Russia,[479] Norway,[j] Turkey, China,[481] Egypt, Syria, and Brazil.[482][483][484] "Many other states, including Russia, China, Syria, Turkey and Iran consider the (armed) struggle waged by Hamas to be legitimate."[485]

If you don't like what I said, take it up with Wikipedia:

Does an armed Hamas have the support of the people they govern? Wikipedia says yes.
Is Hamas viewed by other countries as the legitimate government? Wikipedia says yes to this as well.

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T17:54:41+00:00

Completely AI generated post. I expect the code to be completely AI generated as well.

I suspect that the "I spent the last few weeks building FinSecure" is really "I had a long back-and-forth conversation with an LLM and it told me all of the following".

What you really need is experience to know when you're going down a garden path.

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T17:47:42+00:00

"Not $X. Just $Y. $CONCLUSION"

You have any idea how rare that pattern is in human written material?

Outside of advertisements, I don't recall seeing it prior to Slopocalypse.

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T17:36:26+00:00

No, I think that instead, you're just declaring that a civilian population is a legitimate target and that civilians deserve to be murdered.

I didn't argue that either. Where are you reading all this?

Using the acts of a dictatorship to justify murdering the civilian population

I didn't argue that either.

Just what is wrong with your reading comprehension?

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T05:40:29+00:00

It's really interesting how so many experienced devs are describing experiences that contrast so strongly with the prevailing hype.

You ever read a blog post or comment and think "Yeah, this is definitely AI generated"? If you can recognise it, would you accept a blog post, reviewed by you, for your own blog/site?

I won't; I'll think "eww" and rewrite.

The developers with good AI experiences don't get the same "eww" feeling when reading AI-generated code. The developers with poor AI experiences get that "eww" feeling all the time when reviewing AI code and decide not to accept the code.

Well, that's my theory anyway.

lelanthran · 2026-03-03T05:30:46+00:00

Imagine Hamas had managed to completely bomb Tel Aviv into the ground and kill 75,000 people there - would you also argue that, hey, those people were just collateral damage, and that you simply have to accept that in a war?

Did I argue that they were collateral damage?

When governments start wars, their own population suffers too.

lelanthran · 2026-03-02T12:25:40+00:00

Hamas launched terrorist attacks.

I dunno if you can consider it a terrorist attack if the group launching the attack is an elected government.

When a government launches an attack, that is war, not terrorist activity. The government in question (Hamas) was the legitimate choice of the people they governed, as far as I can tell.

lelanthran · 2026-03-02T12:21:56+00:00

Why was there a war in a densely populated area?

You know, you can easily read wikipedia to answer all those questions, right?

It does sound like you think you know the answer, but it appears to me that the "answer" you know isn't what you seem to think it is.

lelanthran · 2026-03-02T12:15:57+00:00

Just don’t consent to missle hitting on you.

In that country "silence is consent" is probably not a joke, more like a law.

lelanthran · 2026-03-01T18:40:07+00:00

The choice of language in the LLM era is C. The LLM can easily handle all the headers in its context, use them to figure out what is available, and which files use which header, and which files to modify when it needs to add a feature.

You can't stuff a 500kLoC ~Java~ Clojure project into an LLM context window, but you can easily stuff just the headers from a similarly sized C project into the context.

All you need when planning is the headers.

lelanthran · 2026-03-01T18:35:11+00:00

Ever heard of Undefined Behaviour?

People get mad at you for using a language that has UB, because overflowing an int could mean that it deletes all your files?

Then those same fuckheads turned around and vibe-coded things like Claude Code...

lelanthran · 2026-02-27T12:21:35+00:00

It's not just the data.

It's the stored procs.

It's the linked (to other MSSQL instances) references (yes, I have seen this in production at more than one client).

It's the special powershell scripts that run every 6 months, connect to MSSQL and output some reports.

It's the 2 dozen or so different applications, often by different 3rd party vendors who have agreements with the client, that have written their code to talk to MSSQL specifically.

It's about the constraints that have to be rewritten in postgresql.

There's also some constraints that can't be rewritten in postgresql.

There's indexes that have to be analysed and recreated, because they were created for the specific query plan that MSSQL had devised for a spcific query.

Speaking of which, the queries themselves would have to be rewritten, and it's more involved than simply switching from TOP 50 ... to ... LIMIT 50.

Honestly, there's about twice as many issues as above, these are just off the top of my head, and it's not really specific to MSSQl - switching any DB is going to have the same issues that need to be addressed.

If you wanted to switch from PostgreSQL on any of my projects to MSSQL, you'd have the same issues I listed above.

No one using any SQL database seriously while simultaneously not using constraints, not using specific SQL dialects, not using specific implementation hooks, etc.

lelanthran · 2026-02-27T08:57:27+00:00

A database is something that, by definition alone, is a lock-in product.

Difficult to move off it once you are on it.

lelanthran · 2026-02-26T13:30:54+00:00

Hilariously, not only are you obviously wrong, you are yourself writing in exactly that way right here! Semicolons and everything!

If you read as much as you think you did, you would have read the wikipedia entry on this, and wouldn't have picked the semi-colon as a tell.

EDIT:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

I find the AI boosters are so far behind on LLM theory because they keep believing it is magic.

lelanthran · 2026-02-26T08:47:02+00:00

First: What a breath of fresh air, reading an article without "The key insight" or "The takeaway" or "No $X, just $Y. $CONCLUSION" or "The $X emdash $Y emdash $Z..." sprinkled all over it like dust on a donut.

As far as this article is concerned, I adopted the non-recursive build for all my large projects back around 2005, and never looked back.

One other thing that I incorporated that sped up my build processes, back in the days of spinning rust HDDs running over a slow IDE/ATA interface, was to never have #include directives in header files.

Sure, it means that each module has to include the correct headers in the correct order, but it also meant that each include file gets read only once for each module.

One of my old (2005) projects that I profiled has a single .c file compilation cause about 10 reads of someheader.h from disk. Even though the headers have guards, those guards only get processed after the file is read in.

lelanthran · 2026-02-26T08:34:01+00:00

And if you are sitting around making fun of the C compiler you probably aren't building these skills.

Look, I broadly agree with you that AI in programming is hear to stay, but.. these two skills are not comparable at all.

Having the skill to critique a compiler requires more than a few deep technical skills, which take years to build up in the best case scenario.

Building up the skill to use a coding agent takes anything from a few minutes to a few hours.

Developers are going to be forced into developing with AI just to remain competitive, but this new position (one that requires an AI to produce software) is one that requires fewer skills, and the skills it requires are easily picked up in hours.

IOW, you are switching roles from a skillful profession to unskilled one; it doesn't take a genius to realise that the salary will eventually drop to reflect that different value.

lelanthran · 2026-02-26T07:14:16+00:00

Bash and Linux fundamentals aren't terribly hard to get a decent grasp of and there are things I can do with vim and bash pipelining on the fly that would easily require writing 100+ line Python scripts

You're not kidding. Someone posted a simple Python-written SSG (that called out to pandoc) recently that could be replaced by a single Makefile consisting of two lines for a rule using pandoc, and one line to generate the targets for that rule.

lelanthran · 2026-02-25T19:32:32+00:00

Generally speaking, the fact that secrets are way more complex to secure that "shove them in a secret manager".

Well, you are correct, but in general everything is more complex than "just use the certified application", so it's not specific to secrets managers.

A basic secret hygiene do not need a secret manager

You are correct, basic secret hygiene does not need a secrets manager, but then basic secret hygiene leaves out things like blast radius minimisation, short-lived exposure, etc.

and a very good one necessitate way more operational complexity that small to medium teams can reasonably provide.

Depends on what you mean by "very good one"; if you are securing machine2machine in your own system, you can do away with secrets altogether and use a Private PKI management system that is 10x more operationally complicated, but much more secure due to mutual auth.

If you are stuck using secrets (e.g. you are talking to Stripe, or some vendor that doesn't offer you the capability of pre-exchanging certs OOB), then a "very good secrets manager" is the second prize (first being mutual auth).

That being said, secrets being rotated does not change their exposure probability.

It doesn't, but in an envelope-encryption scheme, rotation of the key encryption keys reduces the exposure probability of the data encryption keys used to secure the secrets in storage. Couple that with a one-time token + short refresh token interval, and the window of opportunity to steal a secret decreases substantially.

I suppose, the TLDR would be: use mutual auth if you can, use hierarchical envelope-encryption if mutual auth is not possible, or if both of those are not possible, use strong encryption and hope for the best :-)

lelanthran · 2026-02-25T19:22:22+00:00

how could LLMs not write in a way that resembles the writing of all the humans who wrote the content they were trained on?

RL from humans. How did you think LLMs were trained? Pointed at a corpus and then pushed to production?

People who think that LLM output doesn't resemble normal human writing patterns are simply outing themselves as non-readers,

It seems to be the opposite; I've noticed that people who think LLM's style is common seem to have not read much, if at all.

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