Topics

The concepts the writing keeps returning to. Mention one of these terms in a post and it links here automatically — which is also how the 73 connections on the graph get built.

Agent estate

The accumulated set of scheduled and autonomous agents a person is actually running — usually larger, older, and less governed than they think.

Also: agent fleet, the estate

Agentic operator

The person who directs, supervises, and is accountable for a fleet of agents. An emerging job title, and already an informal one.

Also: agent operator

Comprehension debt

Code that exists in your repository and not in anyone's head. Distinct from technical debt, and accruing much faster.

Also: comprehension gap, cognitive debt

Context engineering

Deciding what a model gets to see, and what it must not — the discipline that replaced prompt engineering once agents got long-running.

Also: context window management

Dark factory

A plant automated to the point that the lights can stay off — borrowed from manufacturing to name what is happening to software.

Also: dark factory software, lights-out manufacturing

Distributed teams

Working with people you cannot see, in time zones that do not overlap with yours. The best preparation for agents that I did not know I was getting.

Also: offshore team, remote team, offshore engineering

Event sourcing

Storing what happened rather than what is currently true, so any past state can be reconstructed. Built it for a regulator; keep reaching for it for agents.

Also: event-sourced, append-only log

Hard deadlines

A date set by someone who does not care about your sprint. Election day, a filing date, a regulator. The only real teacher of shipping I have met.

Also: immovable deadline, an immovable deadline

Harness

Everything around the model — the prompts, tools, retries, permissions, and checks that turn a text generator into something that can be trusted with work.

Also: agent harness, the harness

Legacy code

Code that outlived the assumptions it was written under. I have been writing PHP since version 4, so I have made a lot of it.

Also: legacy systems

Many hats

Holding several unrelated jobs at once. A survival adaptation at small companies, and the closest thing I have to a trained skill.

Also: wearing many hats, the generalist

Owning your platform

The difference between an audience you can reach and an audience someone else can revoke. I learned this expensively.

Also: platform risk, rented audience

Player-coach

The engineering leader who never stopped shipping. A compromise for most of my career; the correct position now.

Also: working manager, hands-on leader

The control arm

The comparison group nobody is running — the same work done the old way, so you could actually tell whether the new way is faster.

Also: control group

Verification

Confirming that what was produced is actually correct. Generation got cheap; this did not, and it is now the constraint.

Also: the verification gap