🔗 The 8 levels of agentic engineering

AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That's why all the SWE-bench score maxxing isn't syncing with the productivity metrics engineering leadership actually cares about. When Anthropic's team ships a product like Cowork in 10 days and another team can't move past a broken POC using the same models, the difference is that one team has closed the gap between capability and practice and the other hasn't.

That gap doesn't close overnight. It closes in levels. 8 of them. Most of you reading this are likely past the first few, and you should be eager to reach the next one because each subsequent level is a huge leap in output, and every improvement in model capability amplifies those gains further.

The other reason you should care is the multiplayer effect. Your output depends more than you'd think on the level of your teammates. Say you're a level 7 wizard, raising several solid PRs with your background agents while you sleep. If your repo requires a colleague's approval before merge, and that colleague is on level 2, still manually reviewing PRs, that stifles your throughput. So it is in your best interest to pull your team up.

From talking to several teams and individuals practicing AI-assisted coding, here's the progression of levels I've seen play out, imperfectly sequential.