Agentic Engineering Patterns
AI Summary
An evolving, chaptered guide to the coding practices that get the best results from agents: red/green TDD, linear walkthroughs, hoarding reusable playbooks — plus the field's most-cited working definition of the term itself.
Original excerpt
Willison's guide is the closest thing to a textbook the field has: a living, chaptered collection of patterns he actually uses, updated as the tools change. The definitional page is the anchor — "the practice of developing software with the assistance of coding agents" — deliberately boring phrasing that strips the hype out of the term.
The patterns themselves are concrete: start agents from a failing test (red/green), walk through agent output linearly rather than skimming, keep a personal library of prompts and playbooks that worked, and treat every agent session as producing an artifact you must be able to defend in review.
Where Yegge extrapolates, Willison documents. The two of them…
Frequently asked questions
What is "Agentic Engineering Patterns" about?
An evolving, chaptered guide to the coding practices that get the best results from agents: red/green TDD, linear walkthroughs, hoarding reusable playbooks — plus the field's most-cited working definition of the term itself.
Who wrote "Agentic Engineering Patterns"?
"Agentic Engineering Patterns" was written by Simon Willison. It is curated in the Agentic Engineering vault on Burn 451, which covers engineering with ai coding agents.
How can I read more content from Agentic Engineering?
The complete Agentic Engineering reading list is available at burn451.cloud/vault/agentic-engineering. Each article includes an AI-generated summary so you can decide what to read in seconds. Connect the Burn 451 MCP server to Claude or Cursor to query all Agentic Engineering articles as live AI context.
Can I use "Agentic Engineering Patterns" with Claude or Cursor?
Yes. Install the burn-mcp-server npm package and connect it to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor. Once connected, your AI can search and reference this article and the full Agentic Engineering vault in real time — no manual copy-paste required.
15 more articles in this vault.
Import the full Agentic Engineering vault to Burn 451 and build your own knowledge base.
Content attributed to the original author (Simon Willison). Burn 451 curates publicly available writing as a reading index. For removal requests, contact @hawking520.