~ A working canon · Volume I ~
Are you ready for the
agentic future?
A rubric, a set of recipes, and ongoing research for building codebases that safely host autonomous engineering work.
§ The five pillars
The gap between “AI can do the task” and “AI actually ships production value with trust” is an engineering environment problem. These five pillars name what a codebase has to get right before autonomous work is safe at speed.
Read in sequence the first time. After that, the pillars are a map — go where your codebase hurts. Each pillar holds criteria scored 0 to 3; two is the realistic operational target.
Focus
Narrow the agent’s world to what matters; what remains is the right context.
Validation
Hard, deterministic rules that catch non-deterministic output.
Actions
The agent’s ability to act externally in the real world.
Safe Space
Blast-radius containment, so "going wrong" has bounded cost.
Workflow
The meta-layer that ties 1–4 together, including periodic and proactive loops.