Levels of agentic autonomy

A ladder for locating where a developer or team currently operates, borrowed in
spirit from the self-driving-car levels. It runs from manual coding, through
chat-based assistance and agentic tools with line-by-line review, to plan-first
PR-only review, idea-to-PR on a single machine, and finally parallel cloud
execution where one person directs a fleet of agents from anywhere. Students learn
that the rungs are cumulative — each builds the mental models the next requires, so
skipping them breeds distrust — and that most teams plateau at line-by-line review,
which is exactly the bottleneck the rest of the module dismantles.