Six Agentic Development Rules That Survived 2026
Six agentic development rules from a year of building software factories, 15.8B tokens, and deleting harnesses when the data pushed back.
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Engineering, craft, and curiosity.
Self-taught engineer, recovering history major. Tech, woodworking, home automation.
Six agentic development rules from a year of building software factories, 15.8B tokens, and deleting harnesses when the data pushed back.
Inside my dark factory hardware fleet: 6 mini-PCs, 48 pod slots, why a 2.6x faster Zen 4 CPU only runs CI 1.17x faster, and why AWS costs $20k-$33k/year.
Why I deleted 6,000 lines of LLM friction-counting in Leaf and replaced them with SQL flags, an Analyst agent, and a daily Dream pass.
Post-mortem fixes bloated my dark factory's agent prompts to 17,072 words in 30 days. See what happened when I cut 65% of the rules and moved them to code.
How I built an autonomous security loop in Leaf with Trivy, Semgrep, and an examiner agent, and what its first 289 findings fixed in BrandCast.