AI Agent Engineering Notes

Practical guides to AI agents, agentic systems, and AI-native software engineering

Start here

A practical path into agent engineering, from foundations to system design and engineering leadership.

  1. Optimize Units of Work, Not Growth TargetsGrowth becomes more actionable when leaders stop treating it as a target and start removing friction from the individual units of work that create it.
Build AI agentsArchitecture, evaluation, memory, orchestration, and reliability. Lead engineering systemsDecision-making, flow, team design, and sustainable delivery.
26 Nov 2025

Architect Your Promotion Pipeline with Growth Systems Not Career Ladders

Most engineering managers think about promotions reactively: someone performs well, you promote them. But exceptional E...
25 Nov 2025

Design Your Teams Decision Latency

Most engineering managers obsess over making the *right* decisions. But the teams that win aren't necessarily the ones ...
24 Nov 2025

Shape the Decision Space Before the Decision

The most impactful engineering managers don't make great decisions—they ensure great decisions get made without them. ...
17 Nov 2025

Engineer the Ramp-Up Time to Fix Your Scalability Bottleneck

The single most underestimated constraint in scaling engineering organizations is not hiring velocity, budget, or techn...
16 Nov 2025

Master Calibration for Consistent Fair Decisions at Scale

The best engineering managers I know have mastered a skill rarely discussed in management literature: **calibration**. ...
15 Nov 2025

Build Context Portability, Not Knowledge Silos

The best engineering managers don't just manage people—they architect how context flows through their organization. The...
14 Nov 2025

Write Engineering Investment Cases, Not Technical Proposals

The difference between senior and staff-level engineering leaders often comes down to one skill: the ability to transla...
13 Nov 2025

Design for Disaggregation and the Hidden Art of Scaling

Most engineering managers think about scaling by adding more people. Elite EMs think about scaling by designing systems...
12 Nov 2025

Manage Your Teams Cognitive Load Budget

Most engineering managers obsess over headcount, sprint capacity, and story points. But the most critical resource you'...
11 Nov 2025

Manage Signal-to-Noise - The Hidden Cost of Organizational Chatter

The most underrated skill in scaling engineering organizations isn't hiring faster or building better processes—it's **...