Essays

13 essays 6 pillars Evidence base verified 2026-07-13

2026-07-13 How to Structure CLAUDE.md: It’s a Loading Policy, Not a Document Anthropic closed ‘Claude ignores my CLAUDE.md’ as not-planned, area:model. The fix is structural: route every line to the tier that loads it, not a longer file.
2026-07-06 Loop Engineering Breaks Your Single-Shot Context Playbook A loop was always the agent primitive. The CLAUDE.md budget and JIT retrieval you tuned for one invocation don’t fail louder in a loop — they fail quieter.
2026-06-29 You Can’t Cap What You Can’t Attribute: Per-Task Cost A cost dashboard is a lagging report, not a guardrail. Per-task cost attribution is the schema that makes an agent budget ceiling enforceable before the next call.
2026-06-22 Where Just-in-Time Context Retrieval Silently Breaks JIT context retrieval isn’t free — it’s slower and only as good as your tooling. A ledger of where runtime retrieval breaks and how to design the fallback.
2026-06-15 When One Agent Stops Being Enough: The Isolation Gate The trigger for going multi-agent isn’t parallel speed — it’s context isolation, and the split costs about 15x the tokens. Two gates decide whether it’s worth it.
2026-06-08 Review Capacity Is the Real Ceiling on Your Agents The ceiling on how many AI coding agents your team can run is reviewer-hours, not agent output — and that number is already in your telemetry. Here’s how to size it.
2026-06-01 How to Verify AI Coding Agent Output: A Reviewer’s Framework Generation got cheap and verification didn’t. Six per-task moves for reviewing an agent’s diff — from distrusting its self-report to calibrating by blast radius.
2026-05-25 Tier Your AI Agent’s Production Authority by Task Risk An AI agent deleted a production database in nine seconds. The fix was never a better prompt — it was a permission tier the token should never have crossed.
2026-05-18 CLAUDE.md Instruction Ceiling: Maintained Config, Not a README Your CLAUDE.md doesn’t have a length problem, it has a discipline problem. Budget it against a hard instruction ceiling and maintain it like config, not a README.
2026-05-11 Build vs. Buy Agentic AI: Ownership Is the New Decision Agentic AI cut the cost of building software, not owning it. Build-vs-buy is now a five-year ownership call — priced on the maintenance tail, gated on verification.
2026-05-04 What AI Coding Agents Are Actually Good For (And When to Skip) The internet ranks AI coding agents endlessly and never answers the only question that matters: can you verify the output, and can you undo it if you can’t?
2026-04-27 How to Size Tasks for AI Coding Agents The real constraint is context, not lines of code. Six heuristics for sizing tasks so AI coding agents ship clean code on the first try.
2026-04-20 The Anatomy of a Perfect AI Agent Task Context engineering for AI coding agents — the elements that make a task succeed on the first try, with a fully worked example.