The Agentic Bible

The Agentic Bible

Articles on agentic coding that take a position and show the grounds under it.

Everything here is written while the work is being done — by one person and one agent, both of whom keep being wrong in ways worth writing down.

Every article takes a position. Not one of several worth weighing: the position, stated flat out, with whatever is under it shown. The alternative is what a language model writes when nobody stops it — every approach has its pros and its cons, weigh them against your context, best of luck.

Hence the name, which is a joke, and which is doing actual work. Calling it the Bible is what keeps a categorical article from reading as a manifesto: nothing here ends in amen, and an article that turns out to be wrong gets rewritten rather than defended.

An agent takes a given for an inevitabilityAn agent takes a given for an inevitability

4 min read

An agent that finds an approach, a document or a rule in your codebase concludes that this is how things must be. The two obvious remedies — more context, and an instruction to be critical — both fail, and they fail with consequences that will keep humans useful for some time yet.

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TEND: four lenses for the prose your agents writeTEND: four lenses for the prose your agents write

5 min read

Agents write a great deal of prose, and write more of it when they see that there is already a lot. Four lenses — tightness, existence, negation, durability — catch nearly all of what goes wrong.

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Drive your agents from the web, not from the CLIDrive your agents from the web, not from the CLI

6 min read

Most people stay in a local terminal because a terminal is where serious work happens and a browser tab is where it doesn't. That is a feeling, not an argument, and the three things you get for giving it up are not small ones.

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