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.

Ubase Group said on Tuesday it is moving to commercialise its AI Agent service that directly performs customer counselling tasks. The company said the service includes a conversational AI agent that analyses customer intent and context, and an execution agent that handles requests such as automatic transfers, instant payments, delivery tracking and card loss reports. It uses retrieval-augmented generation to draw on product, event and FAQ information and can provide personalised responses and recommendations.