- AI Engineer: an engineer who builds software that makes use of LLMs and other AI models, and maybe trains models (but not required)

- Agentic Engineer: an engineer who makes use of AI tools like coding agents when writing software.

AI Engineer was quite well established in the last few years to that first meaning, mainly thanks to swyx in 2023: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer - which then lead to the popular AI Engineer Summit / World's Fair series of events https://www.ai.engineer/

But this year coding agents have become much more widely spread (the category didn't exist when AI Engineer was coined in 2023), so there's a possibility the term is being redefined to describe people who use those. I think that's a bad redefinition, personally.

("Agentic Engineer" is much less widely used, there may be other names for that category of engineer that I've not encountered yet.)

https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/absurdity-of-ai-engineer-t...