Building Agentic Engineering Teams

Agentic engineering has quietly inverted the fundamental bottleneck of software development. For decades, the hard part was building, so we optimized teams for execution speed, hired specialists to cover capability gaps, and treated wasted work as a cost to be managed through careful planning and consensus. Now an engineer with the right tools can scaffold major features in hours, often faster than they can get a meeting on the calendar to discuss it. This talk is a field guide for leading teams through that inversion. It reexamines the hiring calculus, what makes an early career engineer successful now, and what makes a veteran indispensable (and it's not what it used to be). It confronts the consensus crisis that emerges when anyone at the table can have a working prototype before the discussion concludes. It makes the case that diverse skill sets matter more than ever, even as the skills themselves shift from implementation specialties to differences in judgment and taste.