Andrew Ng, a Coursera co-founder and deep learning expert, said software engineering fundamentals remain essential in the era of agentic coding. He said developers must understand core principles to tell coding agents what to do and what to forgo, and to manage trade-offs such as latency, availability, reliability and cost. Citing his “AI Engineering Skills” research, Ng listed five needed capabilities: building full-stack applications, data management, system architecture design, making systems secure and stable, and scaling and operating in production.