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Hoard things you know how to do - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog

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Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do. A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what's possible and what isn't, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished. These questions can be broad or quite obscure. Can a web page run OCR operations in JavaScript alone? Can an iPhone app pair with a Bluetooth device even when the app isn't running? Can we process a 100GB JSON file in Python without loading the entire thing into memory first? The more answers to questions like this you have under your belt, the more likely you'll be able to spot opportunities to deploy technology to solve problems in ways other people may not have thought of yet. Knowing that something is theoretically possible is not the same as having seen it done for yourself. A key asset to develop as a software professional

Hoard things you know how to do - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Microsoft - Agent projects stall between demo and production. Microsoft's MVP checklist closes that gap. Try it Guides > Agentic Engineering Patterns Hoard things you know how to do Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do . A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what's possible and wha

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