Five Scripts and One Settings Key
The statusline build, end to end - a stdin JSON contract, an entry point that reads once and delegates, a colour-coded session line, git platform routing, and the single settings.json entry that wires it all in.
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A Statusline Is a Tiny Harness
The first exercise I give anyone learning to direct coding agents has no prompt in it at all - it is a status bar. Why sixty lines of PowerShell teach context and harness thinking better than any lecture about either.
Five Levels, One Ladder
Dan Shapiro's Five Levels ladder maps where the industry actually stands with autonomous coding agents - most of it lower than it believes - and StrongDM's three-person software factory shows what the top rung looks like when someone builds it.
A Short Map Beats a Long Manual
Progressive disclosure at repository scale - how a hundred-line map steers agents through a million lines of code, what OpenAI's Codex experiment actually reported, and the benchmark run where changing only the harness moved an agent from Top 30 to Top 5.
Constraints, Not Implementations
Why the context file that says what an agent must and must not do stays current for months, while the one that describes how the code works is stale by Friday - and how to decide what loads always versus what gets fetched on demand.
Harness Engineering in Three Levels
The permanent infrastructure that makes every agent session start smart - tool configuration, codebase onboarding and workflow automation, and the evidence that the harness moves results more than the model does.