Agentic engineering patterns

Living document. Rewritten as the field evolves. Last updated: 2026-04-12.

Technology radar

Adopt — proven, use now

Trial — working in production, still evolving

Assess — investigate, understand implications

Watch — early signal, track for developments

Key risk signal: The subsidy question

The builder community describes a genuine productivity revolution. The financial analysis shows unstable foundations:

The synthesis: The tools and workflows are real and productive. The pricing is subsidized and temporary. Anthropic’s OpenClaw ban is the first direct vendor margin defense. The most defensible investments are in patterns (spec-driven dev, orchestration architecture, MCP) rather than specific vendor subscriptions. The response layer forming this week validates this: vendor lock-in gets routed around within 72 hours.

Sources: Ed Zitron, “The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here” (March 31, 2026) and “AI Isn’t Too Big To Fail” (April 3, 2026)

Dominant patterns in motion

Enterprise deployment becomes regulatory (ESCALATED — April 12)

The competition shifted from agent intelligence to organizational deployability (April 11). Now the Mythos government escalation adds regulatory pressure. Security hardening moves from competitive differentiator to compliance requirement for regulated industries. Treasury/Fed treating model capability as systemic risk means enterprise deployment features become mandatory, not optional. The “five durable layers” framework (trust, context, distribution, taste, liability) explains why: the “trust” layer is now the most critical — regulatory pressure drives it.

The portability sprint (April 8, continuing)

Everyone is decoupling agents from their native clouds. Copilot CLI: BYOK + Ollama + air-gapped. Scion: vendor-agnostic orchestration. Dependabot: multi-vendor agent assignment. Codex: WebRTC transport. The platforms are betting that lock-in loses. The most portable agent wins, not the most powerful.

The platform ships (updated April 11)

Codex v0.119.0 and v0.120.0 ended the alpha marathon. 33 alphas → two stables in 24 hours. The platform is real: MCP Apps, WebRTC realtime v2, 8+ extracted crates, remote exec-server, path-based multi-agent addressing, background agent streaming. Gemini’s GCP backend + Chapters + UCM is the same pattern. The CLI is no longer the product — it’s the thin interface to a platform.

Governance ships at platform speed

Microsoft’s governance toolkit gained OWASP MCP Top 10, SOC 2 mapping, and tool injection scanning in the same 48 hours that Codex shipped data residency and approval workflows. Governing as you ship, not after. The cross-vendor play: own the governance layer, influence every platform that needs compliance.

Spec -> Plan -> Tasks -> Code

The dominant new methodology. Write a specification -> agent decomposes into plan -> breaks into tasks -> generates implementation. Review at spec level, not code level.

Parallel agent worktrees

Infrastructure primitive. Every major tool and community wrappers ship this. Gemini adding worktree support in v0.37.0. Adopted.

The harness as key abstraction

The orchestration layer wrapping the LLM is where real engineering investment lies. Three-agent harness (planner/generator/evaluator) turns $9 broken output into $200 polished product. But: who controls the harness? Anthropic says they do. Community disagrees. Codex building two-tier plugin system may offer a middle path.

Prompting has fractured

Four distinct skills: Specification Engineering, Intent Framework Building, Evaluation Harness Design, Constraint Architecture. The “35-Minute Wall” is where 2025-era prompting collapses.

Path-based agent addressing (NEW)

Codex dropped agent IDs from spawn v2 in favor of path-based addressing. The agent tree is the address space. Fire-and-forget messaging reduces coupling. /feedback cascade enables hierarchical feedback propagation. This is a clean multi-agent communication model worth watching.

JiT testing over test suites

Meta (Feb 2026): LLM generates ephemeral tests per-change. Traditional testing cannot keep pace with agentic velocity.

Sources