Topic

Agentic Engineering

A collection of 5 issues

If only AI can operate your product, you have already lost control

A risky pattern is emerging: teams build products with AI agents, then forget to build the boring screens, logs, and manual controls around them. Over time, they end up with systems they can no longer understand or operate without it. We already learned this lesson with vibe-coding: speed feels great

Your engineering practice as an agentic pipeline

Last week we had a message from a user asking about a Safari bug. The bug has been lingering for a while. I've been experimenting with an agentic pipeline and decided it was time to test the next level. I gave it the Safari bug and it shipped

If the guardrail is a line in a prompt, the model can ignore it ... and eventually will

I learned this building an agent pipeline. An engineer agent would implement a feature, then a reviewer agent was supposed to check the work. More often than not, the review got skipped. So I added a line to the agent instructions: "All changes must be reviewed. Do not skip

Agent teams aren't there yet

Claude Code shipped a Teams feature. Give a group of specialised agents a task and let them tackle it together. An orchestrator coordinates, and sub-agents execute. On paper, this is the future of autonomous software development. In practice, it breaks down fast. I built a development pipeline with it. An

We went from vibe coding to agentic engineering. Next up: building the harness

We realised that vibe coding gave us quick results, but these were unmaintainable over time. So we swung to the other extreme: stepping through every line the agent delivers. Good quality, but you become the bottleneck. The next step is building the harness: the constraints, skills, hooks, and conventions that