Have the agent clone a reference repo instead of describing the pattern you want

Simon Willison·low signal

From Simon Willison's in-progress Agentic Engineering Patterns guide: rather than writing a long prose description of a complex system, point the coding agent at an existing repository that already implements the pattern and let it infer the conventions. The companion pattern is unified logging — give the agent one log stream it can read so it monitors its own operations and recovers from its own errors without a human relaying the traceback. Both follow from his premise that writing code is now cheap, so the scarce input is a precise specification of what good looks like.