Overview
Agentic engineering changes where human effort produces the most leverage. Tactical programming includes the immediate work of writing code, handling syntax, investigating routine bugs, creating commits, and making local implementation changes. Strategic programming concerns the longer-term shape of the system: how the codebase should be organized, how work should be divided, which interfaces should exist, how quality should be verified, and how engineering velocity can improve over time.
A productive operating assumption is to treat AI agents as a large supply of tactical implementers.
Under that model, the human's central responsibility is not to compete with the agent on keystrokes.
It is to decide what should be built, design the difficult parts, create conditions in which implementation is straightforward, and determine whether the result is correct and useful.