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Public story · 2026-03-02 · source-backed
(Intermediate) Audit your context budget, distill references into compact summaries (~1.3K tokens vs ~70K raw), build determinism through TDD and structured output schemas, version your context like code. Source
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Simon Willison released the first two chapters of a living guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns. Chapter 1: "Writing code is cheap now." Chapter 2: "Use red/green TDD" -- the "four-word prompt that unlocks substantial engineering discipline." Martin Fowler linked to it within...
Willison's framing has settled into a real split: vibe coding (intent-first, accept-without-reading, optimized for speed with Lovable/Bolt/v0) versus agentic engineering (correctness-first, Claude Code/Aider/Cline under structured oversight). The tell is process. Spec-driven S...
1. Flip your multi-model pipeline to review-then-generate. Instead of using a reasoning model to plan before code generation, let the specialist generate freely and use reasoning tokens for review. Paper shows 90.2% pass@1 vs 87.2% for the planning pattern. Source 2. Audit you...
1. Set package cooldown to 72 hours across all your package managers. pnpm: resolution-time=72h, uv: --exclude-newer, npm via .npmrc. This single config change would have protected you from the LiteLLM attack. Willison's survey covers all seven managers. 2. Install Lasso Secur...
The fourth chapter of Willison's Agentic Engineering Patterns guide addresses cognitive debt by having agents build interactive animated explanations of their own code. Martin Fowler endorsed the full guide. The methodology is now four chapters: (1) code is cheap, (2) red/gree...
alchemy-utils 0.1a0 reimplements sqlite-utils' core API on SQLAlchemy so it runs against PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB with identical calls. The prompt specified the reference implementation path, mandated red/green TDD with pytest, named a repo to copy the Postgres test stra...
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