Dispatch
Simon Willison: 'How Coding Agents Work' — New Technical Chapter in Structured Agentic Engineering Patterns Guide
Willison published a new chapter defining coding agents as 'software harnesses for LLMs, extending them with capabilities via invisible prompts and callable tools' — part of a growing multi-chapter reference guide, not a blog post. The adjacent Pragmatic Summit fireside chat chapter adds concrete practices: TDD is non-optional with agents, the 'lethal trifecta' (private data + malicious content + exfiltration vectors) is the primary threat model, and conformance-driven development (agents analyze multiple implementations to produce test suites) is his recommended methodology.
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