CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Agentic development¶

Definition¶

Agentic development is a development model where an AI agent does more than suggest snippets — it "writes, tests, deploys, and refines code through rapid feedback cycles." (Source: sources/2026-03-26-aws-architecting-for-agentic-ai-development-on-aws). Distinguished from AI-assisted code completion (human-in-the-inner- loop, agent-in-the-outer-loop) in that the agent drives the inner loop — read → edit → test → observe → refine — autonomously, and the human reviews the completed change at a coarser granularity.

Why architecture matters¶

"Most cloud architectures were designed for human-driven development. They assume long-lived environments, manual testing, and infrequent deployments. In an agentic workflow, those assumptions break down."

The 2026-03-26 AWS Architecture Blog post's central reframing: the bottleneck on agentic coding is not the model, it's the architecture. "The solution is not better prompts, it's an architecture that treats fast feedback and clear boundaries as first-class concerns."

Two axes of architectural change¶

System architecture — fast feedback via concepts/local-emulation, offline dev for data/ML, patterns/hybrid-cloud-testing where no emulator exists, patterns/ephemeral-preview-environments + concepts/contract-first-design for end-to-end validation.
Codebase architecture — domain-driven layering with explicit boundaries, project rules encoding intent, tests as executable spec, monorepo + machine-readable docs for broad agent context, CI/CD guardrails that scale autonomy over time.

Failure mode without the architecture¶

"Without architectural support, agentic AI produces more risk than value." Named failure symptoms: minutes-to-hours feedback per change, deployment-only failures, tightly coupled services blocking local test, inconsistent project structures making the agent guess where changes belong, developers forced back into manual validation loops.

Seen in¶

sources/2026-03-26-aws-architecting-for-agentic-ai-development-on-aws — concept introduction; two-axis prescriptive framing.

concepts/fast-feedback-loops — the primary architectural constraint agentic development imposes.
concepts/specification-driven-development — sister concept; project rules / steering files are the codebase-hosted corner of the spec-driven workflow.
systems/kiro — AWS's concrete agentic-development surface.