Writing on agents

Part three gave one agent a spec. A factory runs many of them on one line, and the idea is fifty years old. What a software factory is, why every era rebuilt one, when it fails, who runs them, and one real factory followed from a whiteboard to production.

Part two ended on a question nobody has solved: how do you know the agent understood what you meant? Spec driven development is the current answer. Where it comes from, who is pushing it, the five approaches worth knowing, and what to do with it today.

Part one ended with five things I want from any agentic harness. This is what each of the five actually costs to build, which part of each one fails quietly, and how to check whether the harness you are using has them.

A model that can write anything still cannot open a file, run a command, or know when to stop pretending it did. The first post in a series on what actually turns a language model into something you can safely put to work.

I grepped my own name in my own codebase and found fourteen hits, all of them in code comments. When I asked the agent that wrote them who they were for, it told me: itself.