AI Agent Engineering Notes

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

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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.
10 Oct 2025

The Multiplier Mindset for Identifying and Amplifying Force Multipliers

Most engineering managers operate in **addition mode**: hire another engineer, add another process, create another meet...
09 Oct 2025

Architect Your Culture with Decision Records

Most engineering managers focus on making good decisions. The best ones focus on **capturing why decisions were made**....
08 Oct 2025

Make Decisions Reversible

One of the highest-leverage skills you can develop as an engineering manager is **designing your decisions to be revers...
07 Oct 2025

Build Escalation Paths, Not Firefighters

The best engineering managers don't pride themselves on being heroic problem-solvers. They build systems that prevent p...
07 Oct 2025

Measure What Matters Through Data-Informed Leadership

As an engineering manager, your ability to lead effectively at scale hinges on one crucial skill: **measuring what matt...
06 Oct 2025

Treat Tech Debt Like a Financial Portfolio

As an engineering manager, your role evolves from solving technical problems to building a system that solves problems....
05 Oct 2025

Decentralize Decisions, Centralize Context

As an engineering manager, one of the most significant shifts you can make to level up is to stop being the primary dec...
04 Oct 2025

Manage Energy Not Time for Sustainable High Performance

As an engineering manager, you've mastered the basics: 1-on-1s, feedback, and project tracking. But to reach the next l...
03 Oct 2025

Pave the Road to Scalable Speed in Your Engineering Org

As an engineering manager, you're constantly balancing the pressure to deliver new features with the need to maintain a...
02 Oct 2025

Shape the Environment Instead of Just Managing the Plants

As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of managing people and tasks—the individual "plants" i...