Agentic Programming

Description

Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for Agentic Programming: From Prompts to Production: A Path to Al Fluency https://leanpub.com/agenticprogramming by Jerod W. Wilkerson! 0:00 Jerod Wilkerson introduces himself: professor, associate chair at BYU, and 30-year software engineering veteran 0:45 Overview of Jerod's diverse career spanning academia, startups, consulting, and defense industry 1:32 Who the book is for: software developers looking to increase AI leverage and productivity 2:18 Origin of the book: a best-practices paper for students that evolved into a broader roadmap 3:04 Core premise: developers are at different places on the AI journey and need a clear roadmap from start to finish 3:50 Why prompt-fixing becomes a trap and limits developers from realizing AI's full potential 4:40 The dangers of a false sense of security from early prompting success 5:26 Determinism vs. non-determinism: why probabilistic AI systems require a different mental model than traditional programming 6:12 What an agentic harness is: the execution structure of agents, constraints, context, and outputs that makes AI reliable 7:45 Introduction to the AI Fluency Ladder: five levels of delegation from prompting to autonomous execution About the Book Software development is changing. For the first time, developers are working alongside systems that actively participate in building software—and the most important shift isn't that AI writes code faster. It's that it changes what you can delegate. Agentic Programming is a practical roadmap for that transition: from writing software directly to designing, guiding, verifying, and eventually orchestrating systems that create it. At its center is the AI Fluency Ladder—five levels of delegation, from prompting and task delegation to agentic workflows, verified execution, and autonomous execution. The book shows how developers climb it, why a new bottleneck appears at each level, and how the developer's role changes along the way. The first half builds the foundation: how AI systems actually behave, the mental models agentic programming depends on, and the failure modes of probabilistic systems. The second half is hands-on—it walks through building an agentic harness, the execution architecture that coordinates AI agents through workflows, verification, retries, and recovery, and makes higher levels of delegation reliable enough to trust. It's written for software developers, architects, engineering leaders, and technical founders who want to understand how AI is changing software development. No machine-learning background required—the focus is the practical implications of working with AI systems, not the mathematics behind them. This book is being published in progress. The core narrative is already here—the foundations, the AI Fluency Ladder, and the full harness-building material—while the final part is still being written and the diagrams remain in draft form (text placeholders that will be replaced with polished graphics). Early readers get every update free, including the finished diagrams and remaining chapters, and lock in today's price, which rises as the book is completed. About the Author Jerod W. Wilkerson is a Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Brigham Young University and has spent three decades alternating between software engineering and academia. His current work focuses on agentic programming, agentic harnesses, and how the role of the software engineer changes as AI systems become more capable. Thank you for watching, please like and leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you! Please Subscribe and Follow! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub X: https://x.com/leanpub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leanpub Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leanpub Create Your Own Leanpub Book! You can create your own book anytime here: https://leanpub.com/create/book Here's the tutorial showing how to write and publish a Leanpub book in your browser (it's free!): http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2932527-getting-started-writing-a-book-in-the-web-browser-writing-mode If you're a Leanpub author and you'd like to submit your own Launch video for us to publish, or if you'd like to record a Launch video with Len, please go here: https://leanpub.com/launch. #books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #leanpub #writing #computerprogramming #ai #softwareengineering #softwarearchitecture #agenticprogramming #AIFluencyLadder #agenticharness #softwareengineering #LLMdevelopment