Agentic engineering vs AI engineering: Hugo Bowne-Anderson's clean split
Al_Grigor · x · 2026-10-14
Hugo Bowne-Anderson offers a simple distinction between two often-confused disciplines:
- Agentic engineering: building software with agents — the agent is part of the dev team, and the work centers on specification, delegation, review, and orchestration.
- AI engineering: building AI-powered products — agentic search, RAG, or agents — where AI is part of the product, and the work covers models, prompts, evals, harness engineering, and agentic loops.
In practice you do both. The author notes students often join AI engineering courses expecting to learn coding with AI — overlapping but different work. The post also points to a newsletter distilling an AMA webinar on AI engineering job postings and which skills will stay valuable.
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