Howardism · Vol. 03Plate II · No. 02
Agent Engineering, tagged.
Notes24TagAgent EngineeringOldest10 Apr 2026Newest23 May 2026
Every article tagged agent engineering, newest first.
| Title | Summary | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Agent-Native Infrastructure | The world is still built for humans and must be rewritten for agents; "what do I copy-paste to my agent?"; sensors/actuators; agent-to-agent representation | |
| Agentic Loops Overtake Bespoke Systems | DeepMind's *basic* Ralph-loop agent matched its bespoke evolutionary+AlphaProof system as the LLM improved; the bitter lesson / harness-shrinkage confirmed in formal math | |
| AI-Driven Formal Proof Search | LLM generates Lean, compiler verifies every step → eliminates hallucination; DeepMind resolves 9/353 Erdős + 44/492 OEIS open problems; verification as a filter for human review | |
| Evolutionary Proof Search | The full-featured agent's mechanism: population DB of proof sketches, Elo via Plackett–Luce/Gibbs, P-UCB selection, LLM-critic fitness for binary proof eval | |
| The Verifiability Thesis | LLMs automate what you can *verify* as computers automate what you can *specify*; RL verification rewards → jagged peaks; "verifiable + labs care"; everything eventually verifiable | |
| Verification as the New Bottleneck | Fiona Fung: coding is no longer the bottleneck — verification, review, maintenance are; shift-left; TDD loses its tax; PR-cycle-time funnel analysis | |
| Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Engineering | Vibe coding raises the floor (anyone builds); agentic engineering preserves the quality bar while going faster; ">10x and widening"; hire on big projects, not puzzles | |
| Compute Allocator | The human's evolving role: deciding what's worth spending compute on; ~1% of generated tokens ship, 99% is scaffolding invested in alignment/communication; abundance mindset | |
| Disposable Micro-Apps | Throwaway custom UIs built per-task to edit a plan ("micro-software on top of micro-software"); copy-back-to-markdown; rational under the abundance mindset | |
| HTML as the New Markdown | Thariq Shihipar's thesis: as models improve, thousand-line markdown plans overwhelm the *human*; HTML artifacts (visual, interactive) keep humans in the loop. The model-facing harness shrinks while this human-facing harness grows | |
| Living Design System | `design_system.html` extracted from repos as a portable, human- and machine-readable source of truth; component playgrounds; bridges engineering ↔ non-technical stakeholders | |
| Does the Human-Facing Harness (HTML Artifacts) Hit Its Own Bloat Ceiling? | Yes — HTML raises and reshapes the human-attention ceiling but can't remove it; bloat relocates from document-length to artifact-sprawl/rubber-stamping; the ceiling gets *more* binding as models improve (inverse of the shrinking model-facing harness) | |
| Agentic Technical Debt | Debt that *compounds* (not just accumulates) because each agentic-coding session re-derives architectural decisions without persistent CLAUDE.md; surfaces late as a forced rewrite | |
| Interaction / Background Model Split | Dual-model architecture: time-aware interaction model stays present; async background model handles deep reasoning/tools; rich-context-package delegation; "reasoning-model planning at non-thinking latency" | |
| Agent Loop Pattern | `/loop` (cron-scheduled) and Ralph Wiggum (backlog-draining) loops as next-generation agent primitive; AFK execution, parallel fan-out, "loops are the future" | |
| Context Window Smart Zone | Smart zone vs dumb zone (Dex Hardy / Matt Pocock): quadratic attention scaling, ~100K marker independent of advertised context; clear-and-restart > compaction; status-line token counting as essential discipline | |
| Deep Modules for Agents | Ousterhout deep-vs-shallow modules applied to agent-friendly codebases; push-vs-pull instruction delivery; reviewer in fresh context; Sandcastle three-agent pattern | |
| Design Concept Grilling | Matt Pocock's `grill-me` skill; reach Brooks "design concept" before any plan; counter to specs-to-code; PRD as destination doc, Kanban as journey doc | |
| Harness Shrinkage as Models Improve | Prompt scaffolding shrinks each model release; Cat Wu's pruning discipline; Boris Cherny "100 lines of code a year from now" claim; mechanical verification stays load-bearing | |
| Model Introspection Feedback | Cat Wu's underrated technique: ask the model why it failed; treat answer as harness-debugging signal not model criticism; caveats around model self-report fidelity | |
| Vertical Slice Tracer Bullets | Pragmatic-Programmer tracer-bullet pattern applied to agent task decomposition; vertical slices > horizontal layers; Kanban-with-blocking-edges over numbered phase plans | |
| Ticket-Driven Agent Orchestration | The inversion that makes Symphony work: tickets as units of work (not sessions/PRs), DAG dependencies, agent-extensible work graph, "objectives not transitions" | |
| Client-Side Agent Optimization | AgentOpt's framing of developer-controlled agent optimization (model-per-role, budget, routing) as distinct from server-side serving; the combo abstraction; 13–32× cost gaps between best/worst combinations | |
| Agent Harness Engineering | Patterns for scaffolding long-running LLM agents: environment design, progressive context disclosure, mechanical architecture enforcement, agent code review |