AI Engineering · Agent Infrastructure

Disciplined patterns for autonomous code.

An engineering resource for practitioners and agents: context engineering, closed-loop test harnesses, machine endpoints, and verifiable execution invariants.

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Machine-Readable Invariants curl -s pyweb.dev/llms.txt
$ curl -s https://pyweb.dev/api/graph.json | jq '.stats'
{
  "nodes": 185,
  "architecture": "deterministic-wiki",
  "endpoints": ["/llms.txt", "/agent", "/wiki/*.md"]
}
ZERO SCRAPING OVERHEAD FLAT MARKDOWN FIRST
Evaluated, not vibes
Every page ships through a 14-column eval matrix

Content and design changes merge only when the targeted column improves and no column regresses. Deterministic graders + LLM judges, frozen fixtures, per-column gates.

98/100
14 graded columns · methodology

Curriculum Tracks

sequenced paths, not a random walk
01 Context Rot & Progressive Disclosure context-rot → progressive-disclosure → subagents-and-context-management 02 Agentic TDD & Verification red-green-tdd → tdd-with-agents → deterministic-lint-gates 03 Multi-Agent Orchestration agents-vs-workflows → subagents → multi-agent-orchestration
69
Concept Nodes
107
Entity Models
111
Primary Sources
100%
Flat .md Endpoints

No matching resources found.

Engineering Concepts & Invariants

All wiki pages →
AG-UI Protocol
Open, lightweight, event-based standard connecting AI agent runtimes to user-facing frontend applications.
agentsworkflowcontext-engineering
Agent Containment and Blast Radius
Capping what an agent can do — not just what it tends to do — via sandboxes, VMs, egress controls, and classifier-gated approvals layered over fallible human oversight.
agentssecurityworkflow
Agent Harness Engineering
Designing the runtime infrastructure around an agent's model — sandboxes, tool contracts, progressive disclosure, and verification gates — as the primary driver of reliability.
agentscontext-engineeringsubagents
Agent-Native Infrastructure
Full-stack platforms designed around machine cognition, deterministic state machines, and cryptographic agent identity rather than human developer tools.
agentscontext-engineeringsubagents
Agentic Code Quality
Risk-conditioned verification and authorization controls for autonomous software development.
coding-guidelinesfeedback-loopstdd
Agentic Engineering Patterns
Disciplined software engineering practices for working with autonomous coding agents that write, test, and verify code in loops.
agentsworkflowprinciple
Agentic Manual Testing
Directing coding agents to actively exercise running servers, APIs, CLI one-liners, and browser automation to verify real system behaviour.
techniqueagentsfeedback-loops
Agentic Software Factory
Operating model for software development where autonomous AI agents perform end-to-end delivery under harness constraints and risk-tiered human oversight.
workflowagentscoding-guidelines
Agentic Vulnerability Lifecycle
The collapse of traditional security embargo windows and CVE disclosure pipelines driven by automated coding agents that synthesize working exploits within minutes of patch discussions.
securityagentsworkflow
Agents vs Workflows
The degree-of-autonomy spectrum from Anthropic's Building Effective Agents: workflows run on developer-defined code paths, agents direct their own process via tools and environment feedback.
agentspatternsllm-fundamentals
AGENTS.md Specification
The root project context standard for orienting AI coding agents without system prompt bloat.
agentscontext-engineeringskills
AI Coding Taxonomy & Agent Experience
Core vocabulary and operational taxonomy for AI coding agents, attention dynamics, developer/agent experience (DX/AX), and execution modes.
agentscontext-engineeringcoding-guidelines
AI Engineer Role
The application-layer engineer who orchestrates AI APIs, RAG, and evals — distinct from ML Engineering by the API boundary, grounded in Latent Space's 'Rise of the AI Engineer'.
llm-fundamentalsworkflowroles
Automated Eval Engineering
Techniques and harnesses for constructing reproducible, containerized agent evaluations from repository code and production traces.
evaluationagentsworkflow
Build-From-Scratch Pedagogy
Building the minimal toy version from scratch as the primary mechanism for deep understanding.
pedagogytechniqueagents
Claude Managed Agents
Anthropic's cloud-hosted agent runtime platform decoupling reasoning loops from containerized sandbox execution.
agentscontext-engineeringworkflow
Clean Architecture
Uncle Bobs dependency-inward organizing rule applied to agent systems: source dependencies point toward stable abstractions.
principleworkflow
Closed-Loop Agent Improvement
End-to-end telemetry and verification architecture where production failure traces drive automated candidate PR generation and benchmark gating.
agentsfeedback-loopsworkflow
Codex Harness Architecture
Architecture of OpenAI's Codex harness: Clean/Hexagonal design, JSON-RPC app-server decoupling, multi-platform sandboxing, and bounded execution.
agentscontext-engineeringsecurity
Cognitive Debt and Walkthroughs
Techniques for understanding agent-generated code through structured linear walkthroughs and interactive explanations to prevent cognitive debt.
pedagogytechniqueagents
Conformance Suites as Fitness Functions
Pairing agents with uncompromising deterministic test suites so they act as autonomous optimization engines instead of drifting generators.
agentsevaluationtdd
Constraint Layering
agentic-patternsharness-engineeringsecurity
Context Budget Audit
Measuring and cutting per-turn token overhead — /context, logging proxies, disable flags, and deny rules to kill harness bloat.
context-engineeringagentscost
Context Engineering
Curating high-signal context (AGENTS.md, CONTEXT.md, ADRs) to maximize agent reasoning performance.
agentscontext-engineeringworkflow
Context Rot
The progressive degradation of LLM reasoning performance as context length and irrelevant tokens accumulate.
agentscontext-engineeringanti-patterns
Cordis Framework
Microkernel plugin and dependency-injection framework powering DeepSeek Harness: lifecycle management, service containers, typed event buses, reversible side-effects.
agentsworkflowprinciple
DeepSeek Harness
DeepSeek's open-source agent runtime built on the Agent = Model + Harness thesis: modular, traceable execution without hardcoded core logic.
agentscontext-engineeringsubagents
Dependency Inversion Principle
principle
Dependency Rule
principle
Designing for Verifiability
'It's hard to eval' is a product smell — artifacts hard for you to verify are hard for users too; design checkable artifacts before building evals.
evaluationworkflowfeedback-loops
Deterministic Lint Gates
Rust-speed linters with error-only configs as the Tier 1 mechanical backpressure layer for agentic coding loops.
coding-guidelinesfeedback-loopsagents
Editorial Diagrams and Visual Explanations
Design principles, semantic patterns, and standards for generating high-signal, self-contained visual diagrams in agentic workflows.
diagramsvisual-explanationagents
Error Analysis and Evals
Qualitative inspection of production traces to discover failure modes, build domain-specific taxonomies, and derive trustworthy evaluation rubrics.
evaluationworkflowfeedback-loops
Eval Taxonomy
Evals as the AI engineer's unit tests: deterministic pass/fail checks, LLM-as-judge smoke tests, and human feedback — three tiers for wrangling predictability from probabilistic systems.
evaluationllm-fundamentalsquality
Eval-Driven Development
Iterative, trace-grounded engineering discipline for discovering, encoding, and continuously testing GenAI failure modes.
evaluationfeedback-loopscoding-guidelines
Evals Skills
evaluationskillsagents
First-Principles Thinking
Stripping complex problems to fundamental verifiable truths and rebuilding solutions upward.
principleworldviewtechnique
Five Debts of Agentic Engineering
agentic-patternscode-qualityarchitecture
Generator-Evaluator Loop
Generate then adversarially evaluate: a proposal loop where a separate evaluator checks each output against explicit criteria.
agentsevaluationfeedback-loops
Git for Agentic Workflows
Leveraging coding agents' native git fluency to explore repo history, resolve complex merge conflicts, bisect bugs, and rewrite clean commit stories.
gitworkflowagents
Grill With Docs
Stateful interactive alignment skill that captures domain vocabulary into CONTEXT.md and three-gated decisions into ADRs.
workflowagentscontext-engineering
Grilling Doctrine
Relentless adversarial interview methodology to sharpen architecture and surface assumptions before coding.
workflowagentsprinciple
Handoff Artifacts
Structured, self-contained markdown documents that bridge context across session boundaries and multi-agent workflows.
agentscontext-engineeringworkflow
Hexagonal Architecture
principleworkflow
Hoard and Recombine
Collecting verified working code snippets and proof-of-concept tools to supply as concrete reference material for coding agents.
techniqueagentsknowledge-management
Idea-to-Ship Flow
End-to-end disciplined engineering workflow moving from grilled ideas to specs, tickets, and verified PRs.
workflowagentsprinciple
Karpathy's Four Guidelines
Four foundational coding conduct rules for agents: Think Before Coding, Simplicity First, Surgical Changes, Goal-Driven.
coding-guidelinesagentsprinciple
LLM App Improvement Ladder
Matt Pocock's ordered ladder of 17 techniques for improving an LLM-powered app — from prompt basics to fine-tuning — try the simple thing first.
llm-fundamentalspatternsquality
LLM Message Protocol
The message-based conversation protocol between application and LLM: system prompts, user/assistant messages, tool calls, and tool results.
agentscontext-engineeringllm-fundamentals
LLM Wiki Pattern
Compounding, interlinked markdown knowledge base pattern curated autonomously by agents.
knowledge-managementagentstechnique
Model Context Protocol Basics
MCP as the standardized bridge between LLM applications and external tools/data — the client-server layer beneath tool calling.
agentstool-useprotocols
Model Provider Abstraction
Why production LLM apps need a provider-neutral interface — and the real switching cost when you code directly against one vendor's API.
llm-fundamentalsarchitecturepatterns
Multi-Agent Orchestration
Hierarchical agent swarms where engineers orchestrate fleets of specialized agents in parallel isolated worktrees: coder to conductor to orchestrator.
agentsworkflowsubagents
Onion Architecture
principleworkflow
Progressive Disclosure
Providing context and tooling to AI agents in staged layers on-demand rather than up front.
agentscontext-engineeringskills
Prompt Bloat
The accumulation of redundant, generic, or conflicting instructions in system prompts that degrades agent performance.
agentscontext-engineeringanti-patterns
Red/Green TDD
Test-first development where failing tests are observed before writing minimal implementation code - the core discipline for coding agents.
tddworkflowagents
Releasable Patch Rate
agentic-patternscode-qualityworkflow
Site-as-Eval-Subject Grading
Grading a static site with deterministic graders and LLM judges, then hill-climbing the design against the scorecard.
evaluationagentstechnique
Skill Treatment Effect
agentic-patternsevaluationharness-engineering
Smart Zone
The optimal token window where frontier LLMs maintain peak reasoning sharpness before attention degradation sets in.
agentscontext-engineeringworkflow
Software Engineering Fundamentals for Agents
agentic-patternsarchitectureworkflow
Structured Outputs
Constraining LLM responses to JSON-schema shapes — objects, enums, arrays — for data extraction and classification, with streaming and tool-based variants.
llm-fundamentalscontext-engineeringpatterns
Subagents and Context Management
Preserving root conversation context by dispatching isolated sub-agents for repo exploration, testing, debugging, and file edits.
agentssubagentscontext-engineering
TDD With Agents
Rigorous test-driven development loop using executable tests as the truth referee for coding agents.
tddworkflowagents
The Feynman Technique
Teaching and learning methodology: plain English explanations, identifying gaps, and radical simplification.
techniqueteachingpedagogy
Think Tool
Anthropic's technique of giving an LLM a no-op 'think' tool so it can persist structured reasoning into context before complex tool calls.
agentstool-usepatterns
Tool Calling Loop
The four-step agentic loop — specify tools, receive tool calls, execute locally, return results — that lets LLMs act on the world.
agentstool-usellm-fundamentals
Tracer Bullets
Shipping the thinnest end-to-end slice through all architecture layers before expanding features.
workflowagentstechnique

Entities & Thought Systems

Addy Osmani
Engineering leader and author writing on agent harness engineering, agentic code quality gates, and software factory workflows.
personworkflow
Aditi Raghunathan
person
Ahmed E. Hassan
person
Airbnb
Global travel marketplace and engineering pioneer in industrial Eval-Driven Development (EDD) for generative AI applications.
organizationevaluationworkflow
Alistair Cockburn
personeducator
Andrei Botocan
person
Andrej Karpathy
AI researcher, educator, Stanford CS231n co-creator, and developer of the build-from-scratch pedagogy.
personeducatoragents
Andrew Ng
personeducator
Anil Madhavapeddy
personsecurity
Anthropic
AI safety research company developing Claude LLM models and researching agent systems.
companyagentsevaluation
Armin Ronacher
Software engineer critiquing coordination friction loss in agent-accelerated development.
personprinciple
Beatrice Casey
person
Beth Barnes
person
Boris Cherny
Engineering leader at Anthropic, creator of Claude Code, and author of Programming TypeScript.
personauthorityworkflow
Brittany Reid
person
Cathryn Lavery
Designer, entrepreneur, and author of Diagram Design; pioneer of editorial visual design systems and semantic diagramming for AI coding agents.
personeducatoragents
Christoph Csallner
person
Christoph Nakazawa
personcoding-guidelinesfeedback-loops
CopilotKit
Open-source AI Copilot framework and creators of the AG-UI protocol for agent-user interaction.
companyagentsworkflow
Cursor
AI-powered code editor company pioneering hierarchical agent systems for autonomous coding.
companyagentsworkflow
David Gros
person
David Rein
person
DeepSeek
AI research company behind frontier open-weights models and the DeepSeek Harness agent runtime developer preview.
companyagents
Dipayan Banik
person
DORA
companyevaluation
Drew Breunig
Writer on LLM economics; argued in 'Fable & The End of the Free Lunch' that high frontier-model pricing ended the era when new models papered over weak harnesses.
personagentscontext-engineering
Dung Nguyen Manh
person
Eirini Kalliamvakou
person
Epoch AI
companyevaluation
Florian Brand
person
Gelei Deng
person
Gergely Orosz
Author of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, covering tech industry trends, engineering leadership, and developer tooling in the agentic era.
personauthorityworkflow
GitHub
Leading software development platform, developer of Copilot, and author of the Spec-Driven Development toolkit for AI agents.
organizationworkflowtool-use
Hajimu Iida
person
Hamel Husain
AI product engineer, machine learning educator, and specialist in LLM evaluation, error analysis, and domain-grounded AI systems.
personeducatorevaluation
Hao Li
person
Haoxiang Zhang
person
Hiroshi Iwata
person
Huy Nhat Phan
person
Ivan Bercovich
person
Ivar Jacobson
personeducator
Ivgeni Segal
person
James Coplien
personeducator
James Shore
Software engineering consultant analyzing economic implications of AI-accelerated development.
personprinciple
Jarred Sumner
Creator of Bun, who led autonomous agent-driven rewrite of Bun's codebase from Zig to Rust.
personagentsevaluation
Jean-Stanislas Denain
person
Jeffrey Palermo
personeducator
Joanna C. S. Santos
person
Joel Becker
person
Johann Rehberger
Security researcher warning about normalization of deviance in AI system permissions.
personagentsanti-patterns
K M Ferdous
person
Ken’ichi Yamaguchi
person
Kent Beck
Pioneer of Extreme Programming (XP), Test-Driven Development (TDD), co-author of the Agile Manifesto, and author writing on AI coding workflows.
personauthoritytdd
Kexun Zhang
person
Kowshik Chowdhury
person
Lalit Maganti
Syntaqlite creator documenting where coding agents help implementation and harm unresolved design work.
personagentsanti-patterns
Leo Yu Zhang
person
Maliheh Izadi
person
Mario Zechner
Software engineer warning about compounding errors in high-velocity agent development.
personprinciple
Martin Fowler
Author, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, and foundational thinker on software architecture, refactoring, and AI-assisted engineering practices.
personauthorityworkflow
Matt Pocock
TypeScript and AI engineering educator behind the idea-to-ship workflow and deep module design.
personeducatorworkflow
Mert Demirer
person
Miku Watanabe
person
Minh Vu Thai Pham
person
Model Evaluation & Threat Research
companyevaluation
Mohammed Latif Siddiq
person
Nat Pryce
personeducator
Nate Rush
person
Nghi D. Q. Bui
person
Nick Craig-Wood
personsecurityworkflow
OpenAI
AI research and deployment company developing GPT models, ChatGPT, Codex, and agent harness infrastructure.
companyagentsevaluation
Peter Cihon
person
Prem Devanbu
person
Prithvi Rajasekaran
personagentsevaluation
Rahul Pandita
person
Razvan Mihai Popescu
person
Richard Feynman
Nobel laureate physicist known for first-principles thinking, joyful curiosity, and plain-language pedagogy.
personphysicistteaching
Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
personeducator
Sabrina Haque
person
Sarvesh Ingale
person
Shashwat Saxena
person
Shazibul Islam Shamim
person
Shopify
E-commerce platform company conducting autonomous agent optimization experiments.
companyagentsevaluation
Shota Sawada
person
Shreya Shankar
Computer science researcher at UC Berkeley focusing on data management, ML systems, and active-learning tooling for LLM error analysis and evaluation.
personeducatorevaluation
Sida Peng
person
Simon Willison
Software engineer, creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prominent authority on LLM tooling, evals, and agentic engineering patterns.
personauthorityworkflow
Steve Freeman
personeducator
Stripe
Financial infrastructure platform conducting benchmark research on autonomous coding agents building production payment integrations.
organizationevaluationbenchmarks
Tatsuya Shirai
person
Tessl
AI software development company researching developer platforms, agentic software engineering benchmarks, and system harness architectures.
companyevaluation
Tobias Lütke
Shopify CEO who conducted autonomous agent optimization of Liquid template engine.
personagentsevaluation
Trygve Reenskaug
personeducator
Tue Le
person
Vercel
Frontend platform company; creator of the AI SDK, a provider-neutral TypeScript interface for LLM generation, streaming, and tool calling.
companyllm-infrastructure
Vinicius Carvalho Lopes
person
Viv Trivedy
Practitioner credited by Addy Osmani with naming harness engineering and articulating the model-plus-harness framing.
personagentscontext-engineering
Wes McKinney
Creator of pandas, POSIT; pioneer of high-throughput agentic engineering harness workflows and automated post-commit review.
personworkflow
Wilson Lin
Cursor researcher documenting planner-worker architectures for long-running autonomous coding.
personagentsworkflow
Xinye Zhao
person
Yanjun Zhang
person
Yi Liu
person
Ying Zhang
person
Yubin Qu
person
Yuekang Li
person
Yutaro Kashiwa
person
Ziqian Zhong
person

Architectural Guides

All posts →
2026-08-30 The Agentic Engineering Curriculum A structured course on AI engineering and agentic patterns, distilled from the wiki: foundations, context, evals, verification, harnesses, and the software factory. 2026-08-28 The Linter Is the Cheapest Adult in the Room Why Rust-speed, error-only lint gates like Oxlint are the Tier 1 backpressure layer that keeps autonomous coding loops honest — with the failure modes they mechanically close. 2026-08-27 The Agent as a Virtual OS: Inside the Codex Harness Architecture Dissecting OpenAI's Codex harness: JSON-RPC app-server decoupling, multi-platform OS sandboxing, bounded context streams, and the lessons of production agent design. 2026-08-27 The Five Debts of Agentic Engineering Why probabilistic coding generators accumulate intent, semantic, verification, architecture, and authorization debt—and how risk-conditioned systems keep autonomous loops releasable. 2026-08-25 Clean Architecture for Agent Harnesses How Uncle Bob's 2012 Dependency Rule and boundary isolation principles solve the durability, containment, and testability crises in modern AI agent harnesses. 2026-08-24 Skills-Native Evaluation and Agent Adversarial Training How evaluation methodology shipped as installable skills and GAN-inspired generator-evaluator loops are advancing AI agent reliability beyond prompt tweaks. 2026-08-24 Loop and Graph Engineering: The Dual Topologies of Agentic Systems Why single-agent prompt loops degrade past the smart zone, and how graph orchestration provides the structural partition needed for production AI systems. 2026-08-22 Hello world The first post on pyweb.dev 2026-08-22 Building Effective Agentic Workflows A practitioner's architectural guide to building reliable AI coding agents: avoiding context rot, operating in the smart zone, and enforcing tight engineering loops.