Nobody should type code by hand anymore. Here's what's left.

gist

Geoffrey Huntley writes up four episodes of Josh Wulf’s Agentic Engineering show on loop engineering. His case: the models stopped being the constraint long ago, so what remains for humans is vision, verification and agency. Delete skill packs, read model cards, lock in on one model, put the whole system under test instead of eyeballing PRs, and revisit ideas once too costly to build, from rewrites to unikernels.

ideas

• Mindset, not models. Huntley says he rebuilt three former employers’ products in under ten days; the capability arrived well before most developers noticed.
• Humans own the ends. People supply the vision and the verification while implementation becomes a black box, so human PR review, which never stopped bugs at human speed, gives way to testing the whole system.
• Stop tuning the agent. Skill packs, AGENTS.md and MCPs are probabilistic comfort reading; read the labs’ model cards instead, and stick with one model rather than re-forming a team weekly.
• Agents amplify the codebase. Like a Roomba spreading a kitten’s mess, agents copy bad patterns everywhere; prompting them to introspect on their own traces helps them course-correct.
• Revisit what used to be hard. Big rewrites, Bazel, Nix and unikernels are cheap now, and a bespoke stack shrinks your attack surface to a target size of one.

quotes