I consider "agentic" to simply mean that it performs well given a loop of actions and a success criterion. As such, lots of code _can_ be written agentically (even if it is not the best or fastest way to do it).
When I am wrapping up work for the day, I usually set Qwen3.8-27B loose on some coding task. It's very good about continuing its agent loop until it can plausibly claim success. A lot of this work I might end up throwing away, but pretty often there's some piece of it that's worth keeping. Because it was "agentic", I end up with some useful pieces for little effort.
A less agentic model would need me involved the whole time, and while my being there would probably steer it towards initially better results, I'm not working overnight anyway. So, autonomous/agentic but not-so-smart and not-always-correct is still valuable to me.
Anyway, I've found that it's reasonably easy to constrain a "highly agentic" model to suit interactive usage, but back when they were less agentic it was annoying to get them to be autonomous. So I think more agentic is better, provided the instruction-adherence is strong enough.
When I am wrapping up work for the day, I usually set Qwen3.8-27B loose on some coding task. It's very good about continuing its agent loop until it can plausibly claim success. A lot of this work I might end up throwing away, but pretty often there's some piece of it that's worth keeping. Because it was "agentic", I end up with some useful pieces for little effort.
A less agentic model would need me involved the whole time, and while my being there would probably steer it towards initially better results, I'm not working overnight anyway. So, autonomous/agentic but not-so-smart and not-always-correct is still valuable to me.
Anyway, I've found that it's reasonably easy to constrain a "highly agentic" model to suit interactive usage, but back when they were less agentic it was annoying to get them to be autonomous. So I think more agentic is better, provided the instruction-adherence is strong enough.