A 3-Part Series: Agents, Workflows, and Skills – Build the Right Thing There’s a phrase I’ve used in engineering reviews for years, usually right before someone’s six-week project gets redirected: “Don’t hire a strategist when you need a soldier.” In Part 1, we discuss agents – an autonomous AI system that reasons its way through open-ended problem. If you read it, you know I’m a fan. They’re genuinely capable, and when you deploy one in the right context, it feels like a superpower. But here’s the thing nobody says out loud at AI conferences: most of what you actually need to build…
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A 3-Part Series: Agents, Workflows, and Skills – Build the Right Thing Every few years, “intelligent automation” gets a fresh coat of paint – and a fresh wave of hype – while leaving behind a familiar trail of abandoned projects. Expert systems. Neural nets. Rule engines. Ontologies (remember those? Well… it’s coming back. That’ll be a separate blog). Even microservices got swept into the narrative at one point. And now: agents. Here’s the take: this wave is meaningfully different. But the failure mode hasn’t changed. Engineers still tend to grab the shiny new hammer before fully understanding the nail –…
Agile resolves human communication failures. But what happens when the humans are taken out of the loop? I shipped my first product in 1998. Waterfall. 3 months of requirements documents, a month of design specs, and 4 months of engineering – followed by a go-live that revealed, with painful precision, that the stakeholder had wanted something slightly but critically different. We had built the right system for the wrong mental model. That experience wasn’t unique. It was the norm. And it’s exactly why a group of engineers and thinkers gathered in a Utah ski lodge in February 2001 and wrote…
A few days after I published Part 2, a friend forwarded me a message. He’s been reading the blog on his phone during his commute, decided to open the live demo, and found that he couldn’t flag a single cell. He’s not wrong. On a touchscreen, right-click doesn’t exist. Context menus require a long-press that the browser intercepts before the game sees it. The entire flag mechanic – one of the two core interactions in Minesweeper – is simply inaccessible to anyone not sitting at a desk with a mouse. I’d known this. I’d filed it in the back of…
The planning session ended. I saved the conversation, and sat for a moment staring at the blank src/ directory on my screen. I’ve been in software long enough to know that the gap between a good architecture diagram and a working, tested application is where most projects succeed or fail. Anyone can draw boxes and arrows. The execution is where the real engineering happens – where the theory meets the edge cases, where the clean design confronts the messy reality of frameworks, tooling, and the particular perverseness of asynchronous state management. The question I was asking myself, honestly, was: does this hold up?…