Design the Codebase Your Agent Can Read
The highest-leverage thing you can do for your agent isn't a better prompt — it's a better interface. Deep modules are persistent context the agent reads at a glance.
Engineering Blog
Technical insights into multi-agent orchestration, local protocols, and
developer-centric terminal workflows.
Destination and Journey
Hand the agent two committed documents — a requirements doc that fixes the destination and a phased plan that fixes the journey — and a feature too big for one window ships correctly anyway.
Full Autonomy Is Just a Small Blast Radius
The blocker to running an agent overnight is never capability. It's trust. And you don't earn trust with a smarter model — you earn it with a smaller blast radius.
Flat agent swarms demo beautifully and ship terribly.
Let peer agents talk freely and a query hot-potatoes between them, each disclaiming the task, while your bill climbs. Route everything through one orchestrator with explicit handoff rules and a turn cap, and the chaos becomes a system you can test.
Inject the Reminder When the Agent Forgets
Your rules file is necessary but not sufficient. Persistent context degrades as the window fills — so move the rule that keeps getting ignored into a hook that fires at the exact moment it matters.
The moment your agent reads a webpage, that webpage can give it orders.
Prompt injection isn't an unsolvable model problem — it's a context-engineering one. Fence untrusted tool output as data in your rules, run a parallel guardrail hook that cancels on a hit, and cap the blast radius with a permissions allowlist.
The Value of the Planning Step Isn't the Document. It's the Interrogation.
Your judgment — which tradeoff, which edge cases, which empty states — lives only in your head until something extracts it. A saved procedure that explores the repo, then grills you one branch at a time, turns a vague idea into a codebase-aware spec the agent can build against.
Adding a system to your agent should be a config line, not a codebase.
Hand-writing an adapter for every external system is the contextless agent's biggest tax. An MCP server collapses the M×N integration blowup into one standard connection the agent discovers at runtime — scoped by permissions, configured once.
Package the Workflow, Not the Prompt
A plugin isn't a convenience wrapper. It's how a workflow survives leaving your laptop — the difference between a personal habit and a team standard.
'It worked when I tried it' is not a test for a non-deterministic system.
Treat prompts and rules like code: a golden dataset of inputs with known-good outputs, run headless on every change, gated by a hook that fails the build below baseline. The eval that blocks the merge is the one that prevents regressions.