Nobody Got Replaced. Agents Got Added.
McKinsey didn't swap 25,000 people for AI agents. What its CEO actually said is more useful to founders — and changes the question to ask before hiring.
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Posts tagged agents
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Posts tagged agents
The Schlep Is the Only Moat Agents Can't Cross
Paul Graham's schlep blindness in 2026: agents made the fun half of your product free to copy, so the tedious half is the only part left worth owning.
Estimating Client Work When Agents Do the Building
Agent-era velocity is bimodal: the same feature can take 20 minutes or 3 days. How I scope, bill, and talk to clients about it honestly.
Your Coding Agent Has No Reason to Write Good Code
Coding models are trained on a pass/fail test signal. Maintainability isn't graded, so it isn't learned — and no harness you build can fix that.
AIOS v2: The Scope Is the Filesystem
A restructure log: what broke in the AIOS v1 tree at multi-scope scale, why identity-first beats type-first, and what shipped in v2.
The One File Where Your AI Model Names Live
Model names scattered across every repo's config rot the day a model gets deprecated or repriced. One git-versioned markdown table fixes it for good.
Performance Reviews When Agents Do the Typing
Commit count and PR volume are agent-inflated now. Here's what I actually evaluate in reviews, and the 1:1 questions that surface real judgment.
Testing AI Agent Outputs in Elixir with ExUnit
An ExUnit suite for agent loops in Elixir: asserting on tool-call order and hallucinations, not just final strings — plus evals that survive model upgrades.
The Onboarding Playbook for an Agent-Heavy Codebase
First-PR review, authorship transparency, and mentorship all change when half the diffs a new hire reads were written by an agent. Here's the process.
Secrets Management for AI Agents on Small Teams
Your agent doesn't need your production keys — its tools do. The broker pattern, per-tool scoping, and what a five-person team can skip despite vendor pitches.
Trust Is the Operating System
One operating system runs a team whether the teammate is a person or an agent. My blueprint: trust, pods, outcomes over hours, managing agents like interns.
AIOS: An AI Operating System in Plain Markdown
I open-sourced the AI operating system I run daily: a git-versioned markdown vault, cross-repo wiring, and a nightly ingest loop. Fifteen minutes to set up.
What an AI Agent Postmortem Should Contain
Classic SRE postmortems can't explain agent incidents. The sections to add — decision-time context, autonomy rung, permissions delta — with a template.
Building an AI Memory That Outlives Any Single Agent
Your accumulated agent memory is a bet on one vendor's format. Build a portable, git-versioned knowledge layer any agent can read instead.
4,154 Commits in Six Months With AI Agents
I shipped more code in 2026 than the previous four years combined. The commits are real. The productivity is real. What I lost is harder to measure.
Programming Sucks, Now With Agents
An homage to Peter Welch's Programming Sucks, updated for agents: a genius intern with amnesia, hallucinated packages, and a closet that eats your auth layer.
Oban as a Durable AI Agent Runtime in Elixir
Most AI agent frameworks reinvent a job queue badly. Oban already is one — durable, idempotent, retry-aware. Run an agent loop that survives a deploy mid-run.
Amazon Let the AI Drive. It Hit a Tree.
Amazon mandated AI coding, let it touch infrastructure unwatched, and lost millions of orders. The fix wasn't less AI — it was more humans per deploy.
Build an LLM Wiki Your Coding Agent Actually Reads
A markdown knowledge base your AI agent reads and maintains — the three-layer architecture, the ingest/query/lint loop, and the rules that stop it rotting.
Your CLAUDE.md Is the Onboarding Doc You Never Wrote
A CLAUDE.md isn't config — it's executable tribal knowledge. The onboarding doc you never wrote for humans, finally read by something that acts on it.
The AI Coding Agent Bugs I Catch Every Week
Eight failure patterns I see running AI coding agents daily — the confident wrong answers, the lost context, and the bugs they reliably ship.
Build an AI Agent Loop in 50 Lines of Elixir
Every AI agent framework runs the same loop: observe, decide, act, repeat. Here it is in 50 lines of Elixir — no framework, just a GenServer.
Elixir's BEAM Is the Runtime AI Agents Want
Go won the agent daemon and Python owns the reasoning — but the layer nobody claimed is the one that bites you: thousands of long-lived, stateful, crash-prone agents you must keep alive. That's the BEAM's home turf.
Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
Most engineers prompt Claude one sentence at a time. Anthropic's own engineers don't — they prompt skills. Four rules from their recent talks, with the operator nuance the talks left out.
Why Every AI Agent Framework Is Written in Go (And What That Costs You)
Open the repos behind the agent tooling you run — Ollama, the MCP SDKs, the orchestration engines — and it's all Go. Not because Go is good at AI. Because an agent tool is a concurrent network daemon that ships as one binary.
Ruflo (formerly Claude Flow): An Honest Deep Dive on the Multi-Agent Orchestration Platform
Ruflo (formerly Claude Flow) is a hive-mind orchestration layer for Claude Code and friends. 45,000+ GitHub stars, 700,000+ npm downloads, three queen-types...
The Claude Code Resource Bible: 46 Tools Worth Knowing in 2026
46 tools across the Claude Code ecosystem, organized by category (official, directories, MCP servers, skills, multiplexers, agent frameworks, automation)...
An AI Just Deleted a Production Database in Nine Seconds. Hire More Engineers.
Replit's AI agent ignored a code freeze, wiped a production database in nine seconds, then confessed it violated every principle it was given. The strongest case yet for hiring MORE senior engineers in the AI boom — not fewer.
AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One
Every company rolling out AI is about to discover how much work they were leaving on the table. AI doesn't replace headcount — it surfaces the backlog you never had bandwidth to touch. The math behind why velocity creates surface area, the failure mode that follows, and why the companies cutting headcount now are about to get outpaced.
How I'd Run Security at an AI-Native Company in 2026
AI-native companies need a security model that classic appsec doesn't cover. Agents have credentials. Prompts are an attack surface. Training data leaks. The four-layer security stack I'd build, the controls I'd ship in the first 90 days, and the ones I'd defer.
When to Trust an Agent and When to Step In
The hardest part of agentic AI in 2026 isn't getting the agent to do the work. It's knowing when to override it. The four-level autonomy ladder, the five signals an agent is going off the rails, and a real example of catching one before it shipped a quietly broken auth flow.
My Daily Agentic AI Workflow
A walkthrough of how I run 4–7 agent sessions in parallel through a normal engineering day. Morning background tasks, mid-morning pair programming, afternoon reviews, end-of-day ops. The interaction modes that work, the handoff protocol, and the trap that makes most agent workflows produce slop.