
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
More episodes of Vanishing Gradients
- The Future of Agentic Data Science · May 25, 2026 · 1h 5m
- Agent-Harness.ipynb* · May 20, 2026 · 1h 20m
- Next Level AI Evals for 2026 · April 23, 2026 · 54 min
- Privacy Theater Is Not Privacy Engineering: What It Actually Takes to Ship Safe AI · April 15, 2026 · 1h 7m
- LLM Architecture in 2026: What You Need to Know with Sebastian Raschka · April 13, 2026 · 1h 18m
- Episode 72: Why Agents Solve the Wrong Problem (and What Data Scientists Do Instead) · March 20, 2026 · 1h 34m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Vanishing Gradients podcast page.