Agentic Engineering and the Lost Art of Verification

Agentic Engineering and the Lost Art of Verification

From Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson

May 12, 2026 · 1h 32m

About this episode

The episode explores the concept of agentic engineering and the importance of code verification through discussions with industry experts.

> I almost don’t read code now . My approach with Roborev is it’s like my code reader. The mantra is: Roborev reads every line of code that is generated . It gets read multiple times. And so, whenever I push up a pull request, the branch gets re-reviewed. And so by the time I’m merging a pull request into a repository, the code has all been read by agents four or five times minimum. I look at the code in terms of structural detail : does it look right? — Wes McKinney (creator of pandas, POSIT) Wes , Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), and Randy Olson (Good Eye Labs) join Hugo and his cohost Thomas Wiecki (PyMC Labs) for the premiere of Show Us Your Agent Skills , a live session where guests walk us through the exact skills, workflows, and setups they use to work with agents every day. We Discuss: * Wes McKinney on why he barely writes, or even reads, code anymore, his “software factory” of parallel agents, and RoboRev , the background reviewer that reads every line four or five times before he merges; * The shift from “vibe coding” to agentic engineering , and why verification, not reading, is the part that actually matters; * Jeremiah Lowin on years of context engineering : trickling…

People in this episode

Hosts: Hugo Bowne-Anderson, Thomas Wiecki

Guests: Wes McKinney, Jeremiah Lowin, Randy Olson

Topics covered

  • agentic engineering
  • code verification
  • workflow automation
  • context engineering
  • software development
  • AI agents

Keywords

  • Roborev
  • software factory
  • vibe coding
  • second brain
  • memory substrate
  • human judgment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: pandas, POSIT, Prefect, Good Eye Labs, OpenCode, FastMCP, Prefab, Cardboard

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