Over the weekend I built a simple photo editing app (none of the existing really suit me 🙂), but at the end I wondered how I had actually built it. I used a coding agent, but also a surprising number of technical terms. I wrote zero lines of code and read only a couple. And yet I used quite a lot of software engineering. So was it vibe coded? Not really, since I care about the source code even though I haven’t read it. It was definitely not AI assisted development either. So it had to be agentically engineered, although on a very small scale. A weird term, but quite precise.

The term was coined by Simon Willison, who first tried vibe engineering https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/ but later settled on agentic engineering https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/what-is-agentic-engineering/

Here is a kind of interesting report on how Claude analyzed my work on the mentioned photo editing app: https://html.lukastrumm.com/photo-cruiser-agentic-prompting/