Engineering Blog

Technical insights into multi-agent orchestration, local protocols, and
developer-centric terminal workflows.

MCP Prompts: Ship Team Workflows as Slash Commands

MCP Prompts: Ship Team Workflows as Slash Commands

The triage prompt your team keeps re-typing makes the agent reassemble, through three round trips, context one expert already knew how to assemble once. That costs 600 plumbing tokens and 7.2 seconds per run. A server-side MCP prompt pays the assembly once, for everybody.

Headless AI Code Review: One Check for Local and CI

Headless AI Code Review: One Check for Local and CI

Your local review habit and your CI gate are two implementations of one question, and nothing forces them to agree. Write the policy once, pin the context, and both surfaces run literally the same check for about two cents a call. The same 30 weekly pull requests on Anthropic's managed Code Review run $450 to $750.

AGENTS.md Rot vs Agent Memory: Why Rules Files Decay

AGENTS.md Rot vs Agent Memory: Why Rules Files Decay

A rules file is right the day you write it and silently wrong forever after, because nothing marks a reversed line. Auto-memory keeps both truths and cannot pick one. A trigger, a dated demotion, and a human gate end it.

Turn Failed AI Agent Runs into Labeled Training Data

Turn Failed AI Agent Runs into Labeled Training Data

Every failed agent run is a labeled example. Capture them with a hook, judge them, count them. The count tells you which failure to fix first. The shape of the failure tells you where the fix belongs, and in one two-week log, half the rows are not fixable in the rules file at all.

Claude Code Skills: Why a Growing Library Gets Harder to Pick From

Claude Code Skills: Why a Growing Library Gets Harder to Pick From

Progressive disclosure keeps a skill library's index cost linear. The number of skill pairs an agent can confuse grows with the square of the library size - and nothing about a growing index tells you that's happening.

AI Plan Review: Catch Blind Spots With a Different Model

AI Plan Review: Catch Blind Spots With a Different Model

An agent reviewing its own plan misses the same defaults it always misses. Gate plan-mode exit on a different vendor's model, and a FAIL verdict re-engages planning before any code exists.

AI Agent Permissions: Gate Irreversible Actions, Not Diffs

AI Agent Permissions: Gate Irreversible Actions, Not Diffs

Permission systems that gate on scariness ask about everything and protect nothing. Gate on reversibility instead, and the same 12-call session drops to 3 interrupts without losing the one that counts.

Cut AI Coding Agent Token Cost With a Throwaway Map

Cut AI Coding Agent Token Cost With a Throwaway Map

Your agent spends about 38 tokens working out where to make a change for every 1 token it spends making it. Then it pays that bill again on the next run. Here's the math, and the throwaway file that ends it.

Build a Shared Glossary So Your AI Agent Stops Guessing

Build a Shared Glossary So Your AI Agent Stops Guessing

Every ambiguous noun in a prompt forces the agent into a blind search over candidate files. A committed glossary turns that search into a lookup - and nets 4,410 tokens back on the very first prompt, no waiting required.

Commission a Subagent to Research and Write Your Skill

Commission a Subagent to Research and Write Your Skill

You don't author a skill from a blank page. You commission a subagent to research the reconciliation once - across a fifteen-service fleet, that one commission is worth 56,500 tokens saved.