What is agentic software development?
It is software development where coding agents do the drafting. I describe the job, the agents write the code inside a loop of their own, and I check what comes back before it reaches a customer. The agents type fast, repeat work I would otherwise grind through, and never get bored of the boring parts.
The engineering does not move to the tool. Scope, data rules, security, the store answers and the decision about whether a thing should exist at all stay with me, because that is the part that decides whether the software is worth running a business on.
Against traditional development it is the same job with a faster first draft. An engineer writing every screen by hand produces the same app in more of my hours, and those hours are what you pay for. Nothing about the result is lower because an agent drafted it, because the draft is not what ships: my checked version of it is.
Is this the same as vibe coding?
No, and the difference is who is answerable. Vibe coding is a person prompting a tool and shipping whatever looks right in the demo. Agentic development, the way I run it, keeps the same speed and puts an engineer between the output and your customers.
| The question | Vibe coding | How I work |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the spec | The prompt does, as it goes | I write it first, and it becomes the list I check against |
| Who checks the code | Nobody, until a customer does | I read every line before it is merged |
| What ships | A demo that worked once | A build with tests on the flows that cost money |
| What happens in month three | The person who prompted has moved on | Same engineer, same name, monthly plan if you want it |
Where do I never let an agent decide?
Three places. Security: where a key lives, what a token can do, and which screen a logged-in stranger can reach. Data: what is stored, for how long, who may change it and what happens when two people save the same record. Payments: the charge, the failed card, the refund, the webhook that arrives twice, and the number shown on the receipt.
Agents write plausible code in all three areas, which is the dangerous kind: it runs, it looks correct, and it fails quietly with your customer's money or someone's personal data. I write or check those parts myself and put tests around them, and I would rather slow a build down than ship that class of bug.
Is it faster than traditional development?
The drafting is much faster, and the parts that were never about typing are not. Boilerplate, screens, form handling, migrations, tests for the happy path and the repetitive plumbing all shrink. The first call, the plan, the store questions from Apple and Google, the data cleanup and the decision about what not to build keep their length.
The clearest example I have published: a booking app was estimated at 100+ hours to repair. I rebuilt it instead and it was live on both app stores in 7 days, with payments, maps and instant updates. The speed came from agents writing most of the new code, and the safety came from testing the flows that lose money.
What that means for you: work whose cost was mostly typing gets cheaper and quicker. Work whose cost was never the typing, like a migration, a store rejection or a decision nobody else wants to make, costs what it always cost. The plan states the date, and the date is agreed in writing before the first line.
What does it cost?
There is no separate price for building this way. Small jobs start at $49. Bigger work is priced by the thing you asked for, at the published starting points: landing pages from $299, automations and rescues from $499, websites and dashboards from $799, apps from $2,999, and monthly care from $149 a month.
Every one of those is one fixed price agreed in writing after a free call, not an estimate that grows. The agents cut my hours, which is why a fixed price is still honest at the bottom of each range, and the model bill is estimated from published prices before the work starts so it never arrives as a surprise.
Do you still write code yourself?
Yes. Plenty of it starts as my own writing: the permission model, the payment flow, the schema, anything where being wrong is expensive. On a small change I often type it myself because that is quicker than briefing an agent and checking its work.
The split is not a rule about which tool is fashionable. It is one question: what happens if this is wrong. Where the answer is a customer notices, an agent drafts and I decide.