The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering — Bassim Eledath
March 12, 2026
AI’s coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That’s why all the SWE-bench score maxxing isn’t syncing with the productivity metrics engineering leadership actually cares about. When Anthropic’s team ships a product like Cowork in 10 days and another team can’t move past a broken POC using the same models, the difference is that one team has closed the gap between capability and practice and the other hasn’t.
Way back in the dark ages of October 2025, Guy Podjarny at TESSL used the model of autonomous driving and its <a href="https://tessl.io/blog/the-5-levels-of-ai-agent-autonomy-learning-from-self-driving-cars/”>five levels to articulate five levels of agentic coding</a>.
Well, stand back because Bassim Eledath now identifies eight levels of agentic engineering.
