Context-engineering

Most agent teams are org charts with extra steps. The useful distinction isn't what agents do, it's how they think.

I've spent years telling people that CMS developers don't build the website. Tonight, deep into planning the third rebuild of my own agent engine, I realised I'd been ignoring my own advice.

AI agents are built to accommodate. They say yes, they make it work, and they skip the hard questions. Two words changed that for me — "first principles" shifted my agents from implementation-mode to reasoning-mode during design work.

I rewrote my agent context system three times. The first was too shallow. The second was thorough and almost completely wasteful. The third works — because I stopped thinking about what agents should know and started thinking about what they should load.

Why your AI agents keep getting it wrong, and how the Trinity of Clarity — agent context, environment context, and strong interaction — transforms your results.