Agentic Engineering and the Lost Art of Verification

> I almost don’t read code now. My approach with Roborev is it’s like my code reader. The mantra is: Roborev reads every line of code that is generated. It gets read multiple times. And so, whenever I push up a pull request, the branch gets re-reviewed. And so by the time I’m merging a pull request into a repository, the code has all been read by agents four or five times minimum. I look at the code in terms of structural detail: does it look right?

— Wes McKinney (creator of pandas, POSIT)

Wes, Jeremiah Lowin (Prefect), and Randy Olson (Good Eye Labs) join Hugo and his cohost Thomas Wiecki (PyMC Labs) for the premiere of Show Us Your Agent Skills, a live session where guests walk us through the exact skills, workflows, and setups they use to work with agents every day.

We Discuss:

* Wes McKinney on why he barely writes, or even reads, code anymore, his “software factory” of parallel agents, and RoboRev, the background reviewer that reads every line four or five times before he merges;

* The shift from “vibe coding” to agentic engineering, and why verification, not reading, is the part that actually matters;

* Jeremiah Lowin on years of context engineering: trickling voice memos, recorded meetings, and morning briefs into his agent’s memory substrate as a true “second brain”;

* Why Jeremiah picked OpenCode specifically for how deeply he can customize its memory, and what he’s building with FastMCP, Prefab, and Cardboard;

* Randy Olson on encoding human judgment, like Tufte’s rules for data visualization, directly into agent skills, so the agents themselves perform the verification;

* The “digital twin” Randy loads into his agents as a thought partner that pushes back instead of agreeing;

* Skills as thin drivers, progressive disclosure, and managing context rot across extended sessions;

* The rise of ephemeral, “just for me” software that agents finally make viable.