# Professional Agentic Product Engineering Guide > Free the human. Elevate human intelligence. A continuously updated field guide to operating coding agents professionally — six tiers from prompting to autonomous production loops, using Claude Code as the worked example. Maintained by Alexey Krivitsky (https://www.krivitsky.com). Source: https://github.com/krivitsky/professional-agentic-product-engineering - [Overview](https://agenticengineering.guide/): the six tiers at a glance — what each one hands to the system, and where to start. ## The six tiers - [The six tiers at a glance](https://agenticengineering.guide/the-six-tiers-at-a-glance): Three stages, two tiers each — and every tier name is a verb for what you do: ## How it works - [Big Idea 💡](https://agenticengineering.guide/big-idea): Professional agentic engineering is not prompt engineering. It's engineering the system around the model. Adapted from Denis Turkov's illustration. ▶ Watch it animate · open the… - [Loops of Agentic Engineering](https://agenticengineering.guide/loops-of-agentic-engineering): The system you build around the model isn't a line — it's three nested loops (the value-factory model). A tight coding loop (red → green → refactor) sits inside a feature loop (specify… - [Climb the six tiers](https://agenticengineering.guide/climb-the-six-tiers): This guide is one ladder: six tiers, simple → hard. A tier is a level of skill and a level of where you're applying effort. Climb as your skill, your harness and your confidence grow.… - [Learn the primitives](https://agenticengineering.guide/learn-the-primitives): Before the tiers, the vocabulary. The tiers show how to use these well; this is what they are and how to make one. They're not hidden settings or some LLM dark magic. These… - [Coming from the eight tiers?](https://agenticengineering.guide/coming-from-the-eight-tiers): Every old tip kept its words and has a new home, and three tips are new. The tip map at the end lists every old tip number next to its new one. ## Tier by tier - [T1 · Prompt](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-1): Tier 1 — Prompt. The agent keeps doing almost the right thing — vague asks get literal, wrong results. The single request is your cheapest lever: say what you want so it can't guess… - [T2 · Plan](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-2): Tier 2 — Plan. Big asks go sideways — the agent edits the wrong things or tries to do everything in one pass — or you re-explain the same conventions every session and it can't see… - [T3 · Verify](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-3): Tier 3 — Verify. You can't trust the output without reading every line, and "done" means nothing concrete — or a long run goes wrong and you lose good work with nothing to roll back to. - [T4 · Enforce](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-4): Tier 4 — Enforce. You give the agent the same correction again, or your prompt still says "remember to run the tests." A request can be forgotten; a hook can't. Recurring feedback… - [T5 · Orchestrate](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-5): Tier 5 — Orchestrate. One agent is too slow or floods its own context, and the build is too big for one pass. The next gain is parallelism — many subagents on independent slices,… - [T6 · Supervise](https://agenticengineering.guide/tier-6): Tier 6 — Supervise. Runs die because your laptop slept, or every run still waits for you to start it — and the team needs agents to pick up tickets and open PRs without anyone… ## More - [Common failure patterns](https://agenticengineering.guide/common-failure-patterns): The coach plugin catches these in real time. The table is the fast index; each "Tip T.N" links to the full Instead/Prefer in the guide. - [All tips](https://agenticengineering.guide/all-tips): Every tip in the guide — all 65, grouped by tier, each linking to its Instead → Prefer pair. - [Port these habits to any model](https://agenticengineering.guide/port-these-habits-to-any-model): Frontier models are converging on the same traits — so these habits transfer even as the model underneath changes. Four traits, and the habit each one rewards: - They follow… - [Audit your harness](https://agenticengineering.guide/audit-your-harness): We all saw this powerful yet controversial tweet from Uncle Bob (aka Robert C. Martin), the author of Clean Code . Let me pause here and explain the depth of this and an interesting… - [Goal of this Guide](https://agenticengineering.guide/goal-of-this-guide):