01 Introduction The fundamental loop of software engineering is breaking. What it means to go from writing software to engineering it — with a crew of agents at your side.
02 What Is an Agent? Model, tools, loop, and harness. What makes something truly agentic, how tool calling actually works, how agents fail, and the right mental model for working with them.
03 Context The most important skill in agentic engineering is context engineering. Curating what agents see, compaction, sub-agents for isolation, and why bigger windows didn't remove the tax.
04 Guardrails, Trust, and Sandboxes The trust gradient, real permission configs, hooks the model can't talk its way around, sandboxing, and the ethics of delegation.
05 Git as Agent Infrastructure Small commits, descriptive messages, branch-per-task, worktrees for parallel agents, and reviewing at the volume agents produce.
06 Testing as the Feedback Loop Tests become the agent's eyes. TDD as a superpower, fast test suites as agent infrastructure, and the virtuous cycle of better tests and more autonomous agents.
07 Convention Over Configuration Consistent structure, AGENTS.md instruction files, and skills — conventions your agents can execute, not just read.
08 The Ship's Log Memory for agentic workflows — capturing knowledge across sessions and agents, separating knowledge from execution state, and keeping memory safe.
09 Extending the Agent's Reach MCP, remote servers, and connecting agents to databases, monitoring, and project management — without drowning them in tools.
10 The Agent Attack Surface New in the second edition. Prompt injection, the lethal trifecta, poisoned tools, slopsquatting, and layered defences that limit the blast radius.
11 Articulating Intent From doing to articulating. Plan-first workflows, specs, constraints, task decomposition, voice and visual context, and skills as the modern prompt library.
12 Local, Commercial, and Hybrid Models Capability, cost, privacy, and speed. Open-weight models, subscriptions versus API spend, honest ROI, and matching the model to the task.
13 Multi-Agent Orchestration Sub-agents for context isolation, background agents that return PRs, the handover pattern, and knowing when more agents isn't better.
14 Agents in the Pipeline Agents in CI/CD — review bots, the overnight agent turned product, cost control, and untrusted input when nobody's watching.
15 Building Your Own Agents New in the second edition. From driving a coding agent to shipping your own — owning the loop, the context, human approvals, durable state, and evals.
16 When Agents Get It Wrong War stories from the field — the eager refactorer, the hallucinated library, the poisoned ticket — plus a diagnostic playbook for fixing agent failures.
17 When Not to Use Agents The overhead tax, architecture decisions, security-critical code, hostile input, legacy codebases, and the craft argument.
18 Agentic Teams Measured versus perceived productivity, code review at volume, a path for junior engineers, knowledge distribution, compliance, and hiring.
19 Final Words The craft isn't dying — it's shedding its skin. What changed my mind since the first edition, and why the captain still matters.
The Agentic Crew