A Sourced Field Study of How Agentic Engineering Actually Works

What it is — An open research study, produced by a multi-agent system, that surveys the emerging discipline of building software with AI coding agents, with eight sourced sub-reports plus a synthesis.

Key points

• Covers context engineering, harness engineering, spec-driven development, loop engineering/multi-agent orchestration, practitioner workflows, and the tools/ecosystem landscape.
• Lands on “Agent = Model + Harness” as the consensus framework — harness design (tools, context strategy, verification) sets the performance ceiling more than model choice alone.
• Sketches a stable 15–20 hour learning path centred on context curation, editable planning artifacts, verification loops, and fresh-context review.