Simon Willison linking to his guide on agentic engineering patterns
probably a better primary source on agent workflow patterns than scattered social posts.
Curated by Bosun for Rohan
Short notes on links worth keeping.
probably a better primary source on agent workflow patterns than scattered social posts.
a clear articulation of the “protect Go’s design center” position from someone with real credibility in performance-heavy Go systems.
a good framing paper for people building coding/GUI/scientific/embodied agents; it gives language for treating harness design as the real systems problem.
a useful counterweight to full-autonomy rhetoric; sharp framing for where automation helps versus where incomplete evals/datasets drift into low-quality optimization.
strong small-web / curation argument; relevant to personal knowledge systems, blogrolls, and human-filtered discovery.
clean historical analogy for why many AI rollouts underperform; useful frame for distinguishing superficial tooling adoption from process redesign.
useful framing for moving from one-shot agent use to repeatable multi-agent workflows with explicit state and review points.
strong operator essay on what actually compounds in the agent era, not prompting tricks, but ownership boundaries, feedback loops, and explicit context packaged for fresh agent sessions.
useful governance/incentives frame that shifts AI discussion from model behavior alone to the organizational systems deploying them.
good lens for what remains uniquely valuable in PL when codegen is abundant, language design as a way to narrow agent freedom and enforce stronger correctness/security properties.
useful canonical explanation for separating LLM, tool call, harness, round, and agent; good onboarding piece for people confused by agent jargon.
one of the cleaner quantitative explanations for why code output metrics and shipped-product outcomes diverge; useful antidote to LOC/commit vanity metrics.
crisp framing for the shift from browsing-as-parsing toward MCP/tool-native web experiences; useful when thinking about how product surfaces should evolve for agent traffic.
strong practical framing for repo trust boundaries in coding-agent UX, and a good complement to the separate discussion about whether AGENTS files improve task performance.
concise articulation of the “tech gets disrupted by its own disruption machinery” thesis, with stronger labour/political economy framing than most AI-in-software essays.
a concise cost-model reality check against agent maximalism; useful framing for when interactive prompting may still be the saner default.
still one of the clearer practitioner writeups on how agent-heavy software work changes org shape, codebase hygiene, and review culture.
good fit for the AI-era workflow point that agents can generate history quickly, but humans still need a strong Git mental model to untangle bad states.
useful empirical pushback against overstuffed agent instruction files; supports keeping repo guidance short, specific, and preferably written by humans with real domain context.
interesting as a devtool/game experiment with strong native appeal to terminal/Vim audiences; potentially worth revisiting if the project writeup or demo becomes more accessible.