What is agentic development

Agentic development uses AI to turn a natural language description of the outcome you want into applications using prompts in a conversation. Autonomous app development is agentic development on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

• In one approach to agentic development, you describe a problem or an application in natural language and have AI generate it without reviewing the underlying code.
• In another approach, AI tools work alongside developers to suggest code, auto-complete functions, and explain existing code, with developers reviewing and guiding the output.

Figure 1. Agentic development approaches

The term "vibe coding" can be anything between two distinct philosophies:

• One definition of vibe coding state that developers don't review or touch generated code before checking it in; simply provide an idea, get code back, no review needed.
• Another definition of vibe coding is an umbrella term that encompasses AI-assisted, agentic-assisted development, where developers still need to understand and support the generated code.

ServiceNow has tools to help you review, refine, and test apps for both vibe coding, like Build Agent, and agentic development, such as Now Assist for Creator.

Though testing and deployment are not always part of an agentic development workflow, they are covered in this document to account for all phases of development. Governance is also included in apps that are built agentically on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Some agentic development workflows do not include reviewing or adjusting generated code, for example in ServiceNow Studio or ServiceNow IDE. However, this document includes information on those processes for developers who want to refine generated output further.

Agentic development enables users across skill levels to build apps by prompting, accelerating the app creation cycle.