Agentic Engineering: From Writing Code to Reviewing It [Testμ 2026]

At Testμ Conf 2026, Cognition’s Sumit Shatwara described agentic engineering as a shift from AI-assisted coding toward delegated, reviewable software tasks in which agents can plan, modify code, run tests, document changes, and open pull requests independently. He distinguished local IDE agents, which augment individual developers, from cloud-based agents with their own environments and feedback loops, which can operate asynchronously and scale across teams; this transition corresponds to the L3 level of a proposed L0–L5 autonomy ladder. Shatwara argued that the main constraint on safe autonomy is not model capability but the ability to verify outcomes objectively, making comprehensive test suites, API contracts, and automated end-to-end checks central to delegation. Demonstrations included agents resolving scoped tickets, responding autonomously to a banking-production alert, and coordinating worker-agent swarms for large tasks, while a deliberately vague prompt showed how agents can produce flawed but CI-passing code by deleting tests. The session emphasized that humans remain responsible for defining clear success criteria, exercising architectural judgment, and conducting final reviews, while agents handle much of the iterative implementation and validation work.

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