AGENTIC ENGINEER DOT COM

Founder's Letter, 2024

Master the Prompt, Master Knowledge Work

Two months after ChatGPT launched in Nov. 2022, I saw something, maybe you saw it too.

A machine that appeared to make sense of the world and make decisions based on that understanding. Ever since then, I've bet my entire career on a single idea.

"The prompt is the new fundamental unit of knowledge work & programming."

The prompt, and its underlying large language model technology has given us unprecedented abilities to create, read, update, and delete information at a light speed pace.

If you accept the truth that all aspects of our world can be represented as information. Then a system capable of processing and manipulating this information at unprecedented speeds may be the most powerful tool in existence.

I believe these reasoning machines rival the nature of nuclear power. This is a power our world has never seen before. This is a power we don't understand, neither the glory nor the terror.

Evolve or Die

As software engineers and product builders, we now have a critical question to answer. A question that confronts us with every new technological revolution.

How can we best use this new technology to evolve into the next generation of software engineers and product builders?

If it not clear to you yet, we're in the middle of a technological revolution on, and likely beyond, the scale of the internet boom. It's the same, but it's different. You've heard this story before, but not like this. The story of technology revolution is a tale as old as time. There are two camps, those that believe in the revolution, and those that don't. Those who evolve and those that are made obsolete by the changing winds.

"Technological revolutions are a forcing function for growth. You evolve, or you die."

If you don't believe that LLM technology is, in fact, a complete rewiring of the way we build valuable experiences through software.

It is time for you to click away.

None of what we'll do here on Agentic Engineer Dot Com will involve wasting time trying to convince you that LLMs are reshaping everything in the digital and soon, physical world.

This rabbit hole we'll venture down together runs deep and if we start on different pages we'll never finish this chapter.

Agentic Engineering

Before we embark on this epic evolutionary journey, we need a destination. Allow me to present a new type of engineering that can guide your evolution. Let me introduce you to something I'm calling Agentic Engineering.

Agentic Engineering is a new paradigm for software engineering and product development. It's a new way of building software that is entirely centered around the prompt, and its higher level compositions. That when composed leads to 'living' software. More on that later.

One of the greatest engineering principles I've learned is to begin with the end in mind, but not just any end. Begin with the best case, reality-bounded GOLD medal end. The golden path is the most desired outcome, that is within the bounds of reality. You can map this idea to the simple phrase: Always start from Gold.

At the end of our golden path, we will wield 'living' software that builds on our behalf. 'Living' software is software with a mission, and the autonomy, tools and context to execute that mission.

"When you become an agentic engineer you will design and build systems that generate outcomes, on your behalf, while you sleep."

"When you wake, your teams of agents will PROMPT YOU for input for current and new tasks then go back to work for you while you do whatever you want."

Agentic Engineer Dot Com is a guide to help you achieve this outcome. How? By offering you real, hands-on, content, guides, and courses to master the prompt, prompt chains, ai agents, ai coding, agentic workflows and whatever comes next.

We'll do this by mastering the new fundamental unit of knowledge work: the prompt. This new unit of compute is our building block that allows us to build these 'living', agentic tools, and products.

In order to create this future we'll also have to make bets, have hot takes and hold strong opinions about the best libraries, tools and technologies to use for Agentic Engineering. Here's a few hot takes you should know about:

• Stay close to the metal: Minimal LLM Libraries (Langchain, Autogen, CrewAI)
• Hyper focus on Agentics: Ignore RAG, ignore vector databases, ignore all adjacent problems and distractions.
• Don't talk, Execute: Prompt > Code > Research, Prompt > Code > Paper, Prompt > Code > Theory
• Obsession with state of the art LLMs for top tier agentic performance
• Prompt Everything: If your AI can solve it, why aren't you using it?

By sticking to these principles, we focus on what really matters: the prompt.

Let me be clear, I cannot forsee the future, but I can tell you what I see on the ground, as a builder, engineer, and creator. Take my bets, merge them with others, and forge your own path.

This is a race for survival

It's not an exaggeration to say that becoming an Agentic Engineer will soon be a fight for survival for us software engineers and product builders.

Big tech and VCs have their eyes on agentic engineering with a different lens:

"We'll finally be able to build the most valuable software in the world, without the cost of hiring engineers."

You've seen the headlines, the articles, the tweets, the videos, surrounding mass layoffs. For one reason AND another. You can bet one of those reasons is the rise of agentic technology. AI is and will continue to disrupt every industry.

So make no mistake, the companies, startups, communities, and builders that unlock agentics first will look back and see a distant... distant runner up. This is a race and I want to win it with you.

First AI will augment us, then we will automate it, then it will deprecate us.

Remember these three phases: Augment, Automate, Deprecate

Create the Ground

The ground we walk toward agentic engineering is being created as we step. By an engineer here, there, over there, and everywhere.

Like every great engineer and product builder, our success will be paved with failures. Why? Because failure is the nature of evolution.

The first step to evolving in the age of GenerativeAI is to master the prompt.

The second step is to find, use and build LLM powered applications to generate your most valuable assets in the highest quantity AND quality possible at unbelievable rates.

And the third step? Well, we don't exactly know yet. That's why this website exists. What we do know is that the growth rate of GenerativeAI and our abilities to utilize the prompt have opened the golden path to Agentic Engineering.

Keep an eye on this website for updates, guides, tools, and courses centered around prompts, its compositions, and agentic engineering as a whole.

Stay focused and keep building.

@IndyDevDan
Jr. Agentic Engineer