Every product team has values. “We care about quality.” “User trust is paramount.” “Performance matters.” These are nice sentiments. They are also completely useless as…
Agentic Engineering, Part 8: Decision Classification — How One-Way and Two-Way Doors Tell Your Agent When to Be Careful
I borrowed this idea from Amazon, and it has completely changed how I think about technical decisions in an Agentic Engineering workflow. The concept is…
Agentic Engineering, Part 7: Dual Quality Gates — Why Validation and Testing Must Be Separate Processes
Okay so here is something that took me embarrassingly long to figure out: validation and testing are not the same thing. I know, I know…
Agentic Engineering, Part 6: Forensic Verification — Why a Perfect Score From Your AI Agent Should Make You Nervous
I have a confession to make. When I first set up the verification pass for my AI-generated knowledge store, I expected it to find problems.…
Agentic Engineering, Part 5: Traceability Chains — How to Connect Product Beliefs to Code That Actually Enforces Them
Okay so here is a question that keeps coming up in Agentic Engineering: how do you know your product values are actually being enforced in…
Agentic Engineering, Part 4: The Agent Entry Point — Why CLAUDE.md Should Be a Table of Contents, Not an Encyclopedia
If you have worked with AI coding agents for any meaningful period, you have probably hit this wall: the agent knows things that are documented…
Agentic Engineering, Part 3: Role-Based Agent Personas — Why Specialization Beats Generalization
This is Part 3 of the Agentic Engineering series. In Part 2, I introduced Knowledge-First Development and the 10-step Knowledge Store Generator. This post goes…
Agentic Engineering, Part 2: Knowledge-First Development — Why I Generate 44 Documents Before Writing a Single Line of Code
This is Part 2 of the Agentic Engineering series. In Part 1, I made the case for why we need an engineering discipline for agent-driven…
Why Agentic Engineering & Why Now
It was 2021 when they gave my access to Codex to GPT-3. An excited afternoon later I felt like an audience to a marketing gimmick…