I'm disappointed and jaded by the state of our craft like you. But I'm also very suspicious of claims that other disciplines are somehow these much more earnest, pristine, derived-from-first-principles things. It just doesn't fit my view of human nature.
If all I have todo is ask the thing what I want, where is all the great new software? Why isn't everyone running fully bespoke operating systems by now?
While I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't make things more complicated by inventing fancy names, we also shouldn't pretend that software engineering has become super simple now. Building a great piece of software remains super hard to do and finding better techniques for it affords real study.
Your post is annoying me quite a bit because it's super unfair to the linked post. Simon Willison isn't trying to coin a new term, he's just trying to start a collection of useful patterns. "Agentic engineering" is just the obvious term for software engineering using agents. What would you call it, "just asking things"?
I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.
The television, the atom bomb, the cigarette rolling machine, and penicillin are also "just tools". They nevertheless changed our world entirely, for better or worse. If you ascribe the impact of AI to the people using AI, you will be utterly, completely bewildered by what is happening and what is going to happen.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/
I'm disappointed and jaded by the state of our craft like you. But I'm also very suspicious of claims that other disciplines are somehow these much more earnest, pristine, derived-from-first-principles things. It just doesn't fit my view of human nature.