Field notes on agent-driven development
Patterns, anti-patterns, and playbooks for teams shipping software with AI agents in the loop.
Aug 16, 2026 · Konuke
The agent supply chain: trusting MCP servers, connectors, and third-party tools
The most dangerous code in your agent stack is often code you didn't write. As businesses wire agents into third-party connectors and MCP servers, tool provenance becomes a first-class security decision.
Aug 9, 2026 · Konuke
The action layer: designing safe tools for agents
An agent is only as safe as the tools you hand it. The model gets the attention, but the real blast radius lives in the action layer—the functions, APIs, and integrations an agent is allowed to call. Here is how to design those tools so that autonomy produces useful work instead of expensive accidents: least-blast-radius actions, dry-run and preview, idempotency and undo, hard gates on irreversible operations, and typed inputs that shrink the attack surface.
Aug 2, 2026 · Konuke
Grounding agents in your knowledge: permission-aware retrieval and the leaky-RAG problem
An agent is only as trustworthy as the knowledge it stands on. Retrieval is what turns a confident guesser into a grounded worker that cites its sources—but a naive knowledge layer will happily serve one customer's data to another, obey a poisoned document, or answer from a stale policy. Here is how to ground business agents in your data with retrieval that respects permissions, resists poisoning, and shows its work.
Jul 26, 2026 · Konuke
Agents in the back office: automating finance, procurement, and HR without breaking controls
The back office is where agents pay for themselves the fastest—invoice matching, purchase requests, onboarding paperwork—and also where a careless agent can approve a fraudulent payment or leak an employee's salary. Here is how to put agents to work in finance, procurement, and HR operations without dissolving the segregation-of-duties and controls those functions exist to enforce.
Jul 19, 2026 · Konuke
Putting agents in front of customers: trust, hallucination, and brand risk
Internal agents fail quietly; a customer-facing agent fails in public, in your brand voice, to the one person you most wanted to impress. Here is how to deploy support, sales, and onboarding agents that deflect real work without inventing policies, leaking data, or getting talked into a refund by a stranger.
Jul 12, 2026 · Konuke
You can't govern what you can't see: observability and audit trails for AI agents
An agent that acts without a trace is a liability with a login. Here is how to instrument agents the way you already instrument production—traces, decision logs, and tamper-evident audit trails—so you can debug failures, prove compliance, and reconstruct exactly what happened after an incident.
Jul 5, 2026 · Konuke
You can't ship an agent you can't test: evals and regression suites for non-deterministic workers
Traditional software is trusted because it is tested. Agents are non-deterministic, so the same prompt can pass today and fail tomorrow—which is exactly why 'it worked when I tried it' is not a release criterion. Here is how to build evals, golden datasets, and regression suites that let you widen an agent's scope with evidence instead of hope.
Jun 28, 2026 · Konuke
Orchestrating teams of agents: multi-agent systems for real business work
One agent in a chat box is a tool. A coordinated team of agents—an orchestrator routing work to specialists—is closer to a function you can staff. Here is when multi-agent systems actually pay off, the failure modes they introduce, and the security model that keeps agent-to-agent work from becoming an ungoverned mesh.
Jun 21, 2026 · Konuke
Agent identity and access: least privilege for your non-human workers
Every capable agent is a new non-human identity with credentials, permissions, and the ability to act. Treat it like a contractor you can scope, audit, and offboard—or inherit a sprawling, ungoverned access problem. Here is how to give agents their own identities and least-privilege access without grinding delivery to a halt.
Jun 14, 2026 · Konuke
Prompt injection is the agent attack surface: a defense playbook
The moment an agent reads untrusted content—an email, a web page, a support ticket, a PDF—it can be hijacked. Here is how prompt injection actually works against business agents, and a layered defense playbook that does not require you to stop shipping.
May 29, 2026 · Konuke
Measuring the ROI of agents: a model for value, cost, and risk
Most agent pilots die not because the tech fails, but because nobody can say what they were worth. Here is a risk-adjusted ROI model that counts the value, the true cost, and the security exposure—so agent investments survive the next budget review.
May 24, 2026 · Konuke
Always-on agents: triggers, schedules, and governed automation beyond the chat window
Interactive assistants are only half the story. Cron jobs, webhooks, and PR-triggered agents can run business and engineering workflows on a clock—with security and accountability built in from day one.
May 24, 2026 · Konuke
Which business tasks should you give agents first? A prioritization scorecard
A practical scorecard for delegating work to agents across the company—without repeating security mistakes or burning trust on high-stakes judgment calls.
May 18, 2026 · Konuke
Agents in the business loop: use cases, security, and why agent-driven work is becoming the default
Beyond the IDE: where agents already earn their keep in revenue, risk, and operations—and why treating them like first-class collaborators is the only sustainable path.
May 12, 2026 · Konuke
An AI coding assistant rollout plan that engineering teams will actually follow
A phased plan focused on norms, PR hygiene, and measurable quality—so your pilot does not die in Slack debates.
May 10, 2026 · Konuke
PR review checklist for agent-assisted code (that reviewers can use in 60 seconds)
A short checklist to keep agent-generated diffs reviewable: intent, scope, tests, and security hotspots—without turning every PR into a debate.
May 8, 2026 · Konuke
Security review checklist for AI dev tools and agents (pragmatic, not paranoid)
A security-first checklist for evaluating coding assistants, plugins, and agent workflows: data flows, secrets, supply chain, and what to log when things go wrong.
May 2, 2026 · Konuke
What is agent-driven development?
A practical definition: agents as accountable participants in your delivery loop—not magic, not a sidecar.
Apr 18, 2026 · Konuke
Onboarding engineering teams to AI without the thrash
Rollouts fail when tools arrive before norms. Here is a week-one playbook that keeps delivery credible.
Mar 30, 2026 · Konuke
Guardrails for agent-assisted coding that security teams can live with
Practical boundaries: secrets, data egress, third-party tools, and how to keep automation observable.
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