🔗 Why (senior) engineers struggle to build AI agents

For the past few decades, Engineering meant one thing: removing ambiguity. It meant defining strict interfaces, enforcing type safety, and ensuring that Input A \+ Code B \= Output C.

Traditional software engineering is Deterministic. We play the role of Traffic Controllers; we own the roads, the lights, and the laws. We decide exactly where data goes and when. Agent Engineering is Probabilistic. We are Dispatchers. We give instructions to a driver (an LLM) who might take a shortcut, get lost, or decide to drive on the sidewalk because it "seemed faster."

It is a paradox that junior engineers often ship functional agents faster than seniors. Why? The more senior the engineer, the less they tend to trust the reasoning and instruction-following capabilities of the Agent. We fight the model and try to "code away" the probabilistic nature.

Here are 5 examples where traditional engineering habits clash with the new reality of Agent Engineering.