Agentic development
Agentic development is a software-development approach in which AI agents perform or coordinate programming and related engineering activities, autonomously or with human oversight.
The Art of Code
A software-development approach in which AI agents perform or assist with programming tasks across one or more steps.
- How it is used
- Uses AI agents to accelerate programming while preserving human responsibility for quality, design, and durable software.
- How deep it goes
- Explains quality risks, supervision needs, and comprehension debt, but stops short of specifying tools, workflows, or agent architectures.
- Examples
- Contrasts clean and tangled surrounding code, repeated corrective patches, and generated code that works without being understood.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate agent-generated code for comprehension debt, design quality, long-term consequences, and the need for human intervention.
Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition
Agentic coding is software development in which AI agents plan and execute multistep programming tasks with limited human intervention.
- How it is used
- Deploys AI agents within software development workflows to pursue coding goals across files, tests, and debugging tasks.
- How deep it goes
- Explains capabilities and workflow types at a high level, stopping short of implementation details or agent internals.
- Examples
- Uses bug fixing, API modernization, test generation, OAuth implementation, and database migration cleanup as delegated tasks.
- What you can do after
- Apply agentic workflows through Copilot, Cursor, or Windsurf to delegate, test, debug, and refine multistep code changes.
Read how Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition explains agentic development →
Related concepts
- repositoryuses · A software repository is an organized storage location or collection of project files and related artifacts, often managed with version history and change tracking.
- Claude Codeimplemented by · Claude Code is Anthropic’s command-line AI coding agent for inspecting and modifying software projects and performing development tasks through natural-language instructions and tools.
- tool usageuses · Tool use is an AI system's invocation of external software functions, services, or other capabilities to obtain information or perform actions.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.