# Agentic Engineering and the Lost Art of Verification

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/vanishing-gradients-4989163/agentic-engineering-and-the-lost-art-of-verification
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/vanishing-gradients-4989163/agentic-engineering-and-the-lost-art-of-verification.md
Podcast: [Vanishing Gradients](https://stenobird.com/podcast/vanishing-gradients-4989163)
Published: 2026-05-12T08:09:22+00:00
Episode link: https://hugobowne.substack.com/p/agentic-engineering-and-the-lost
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/197300220/95a677f281de2bcc61b422fca5b2d2fd.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/vanishing-gradients-4989163/episodes/agentic-engineering-and-the-lost-art-of-verification
Duration seconds: 5546

## Resource

> 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 voice memos, recorded meetings, and morning briefs into his agent’s memory substrate as a true “second brain”; * Why Jeremiah picked OpenCode specifically for how deeply he can customize its memory, and what he’s building with FastMCP , Prefab , and Cardboard ; * Randy Olson on encoding human judgment, like Tufte’s rules for data visualization, directly into agent skills , so the agents themselves perform the verification; * The “digital twin” Randy loads into his agents as a thought partner that pushes back instead of agreeing; * Skills as thin drivers , progressive disclosure , and managing conte…

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## Transcript

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