As a software professional I’ve noticed a trend when I’m creating software in the age of agents… I spend a substantial amount of time putting into place deterministic verification so my system of agents have a way of knowing if they’ve written something wrong or not.
In agentic software development the bottleneck is shifting from producing code to placing reliable mechanisms for determining whether the code is correct. Verification engineering, therefore, is the practice of discovering, designing and integrating deterministic feedback that help make software correctness observable and actionable.
In a way, the verification system is a sensor system of the agent so that it can have an outside source helping to guide its generation.
Ironically verification engineering benefits people as well. The older guard of software engineering can attest to that, I’m sure.
Verification engineering is one component of loop engineering that I think is worthy of splitting out into its own focus.