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A Book by Rasmus Bornhoft Schlunsen

The Agentic
Crew

Engineering in the Age of AI Agents

March 2026

The Ground Is Shifting

"For twenty years, being a software engineer meant one thing: you open an editor, you write code, you ship it. That loop is breaking."

The Craft Is Molting

"The craft isn't dying. It's molting. The outer shell -- the keystrokes, the syntax, the boilerplate -- is falling away. But the animal underneath? The part that knows what to build and why? That part is more alive than ever."
A cocoon cracking open with light emerging

What Is an Agent?

The spectrum of AI assistance in software engineering:

Can read files, run commands, call APIs, and iterate on results. This is where most practical work happens today.
Rain Man — captain and savant illustration

The Rain Man Analogy

"You're Tom Cruise. The agent is Dustin Hoffman."

You — The Captain

  • Direction & vision
  • Judgment & taste
  • Knows when to walk away

Agent — The Savant

  • Speed & throughput
  • Tireless execution
  • Infinite pattern recognition

Three Core Capabilities

Planning

Click to reveal

Breaking down complex tasks into steps. Understanding dependencies, ordering work, and deciding what to do first.

Tool Use

Click to reveal

Reading files, running commands, calling APIs, writing code. The agent's hands in the real world.

Iteration

Click to reveal

Running code, seeing errors, fixing them, and trying again. The observe-adjust loop that makes agents powerful.

When Agents Fail

Scope Creep

Agent expands beyond the task, refactoring code you didn't ask it to touch.

Fix: Small, focused prompts. One task at a time.

Hallucinated APIs

Agent invents function signatures or library methods that don't exist.

Fix: Always run tests. Pin dependency docs in context.

Overconfidence

Agent presents wrong answers with certainty. No hedging, no doubt.

Fix: Verify everything. Trust but verify.

Context Loss

Agent forgets earlier instructions as the conversation grows long.

Fix: Fresh sessions. Project rules files. Keep context lean.

Storm clouds illustration

The Engineering Toolkit

Guardrails
Git
Sandboxes
Testing
Conventions
Click any node to learn more

I Built the Control Plane

Clovr Code Terminal (CCT) — practicing what I preach

Browser Nuxt 4 + Vue WSS Go Server 15MB binary REST + WebSocket SQLite embedded SDK Claude API + DeepSeek, GLM... 🎤 Voice Input Parakeet v3 Local STT 📊 Live Metrics Tokens, cost, tools, git status 🔄 Multi-Session Run agents side by side 🔒 Permissions Granular control + YOLO mode 🔗 Handoff AI context summaries
"The best way to learn agentic engineering is to build agentic tooling."
clovrlabs/clovr-code-terminal
A ship with its crew

The Crew Metaphor

"You're the captain. The crew is disposable. The ship is not."
⚓ Hull = Your Codebase
⚖ Rigging = Conventions
📖 Logbook = Tests
♕ Captain = You
♟ Crew = Agents

Go Build Something

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