31 articles filed under this topic.
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.
Agents now work unattended for stretches long enough that the conversation can no longer save you - why unstructured runs fail, the five-phase PREVC workflow I adapted from an open-source skeleton, and where this ten-part series goes.
Between late 2025 and early 2026 coding agents stopped pausing to ask questions - this series opener maps the five-discipline stack I now use to direct them, from table-stakes prompting to specification engineering.
Teams ask for a rewrite as though greenfield were a reward for enduring the old codebase - it is a diagnosis with a test attached, and misdiagnosis is how rewrites fail. Part 1 of 2 on choosing the field you build on.
A chat window bolted onto a product is not an AI strategy, and neither is an assistant licence mandated for developers - the case for adoption with intent, and the staged-maturity evidence behind it.
Context windows degrade before they fill - the evidence for context rot, one team's 40% working rule, and the three ways a window turns toxic long before it runs out of room.
Write and select decide what enters the context window - compress and isolate decide what survives inside it, from intentional compaction to sub-agents and the file system as the agent's real memory.
LangChain's four-pillar taxonomy gives context engineering its working vocabulary - this part walks the first two pillars in depth, authoring what the agent wakes up knowing and choosing what a task actually needs.
Everything that looks like memory in an agent is tokens being written back into the window - the mental model beneath all of context engineering, and the week in June 2025 when the discipline got its name.
The prompt is the smallest and least durable artefact in the whole agent system - why the original skill of the AI era stopped being the differentiator, and what good prompt craft still buys you every single day.
Between late 2025 and early 2026 coding agents stopped pausing to ask questions - this series opener maps the five-discipline stack I now use to direct them, from table-stakes prompting to specification engineering.
