What’s New

Recent changes to the Encyclopedia.

2026-04-15 (afternoon)

What’s New

New article: Spec-Driven Development – the workflow that forms around a written spec and keeps agents aligned as systems grow, at three rigor levels from spec-first to spec-as-source.
New article: Code Mode – give the agent a small API and a sandbox, and let it write code that calls tools instead of emitting JSON one step at a time.
Improved: The Spec-Driven Development article was polished – the four core disciplines are now a clearer bullet list, the subtitle is cleaner, and the Feynman epigraph is sourced.
Improved: The Eval article’s Sources now reflect the 2026 SWE-bench landscape – SWE-bench Verified (the de-facto scoreboard) and SWE-bench Pro (its harder successor).
Improved: The Harnessability article’s Further Reading gained two 2026 companion pieces – OpenAI’s Codex App Server follow-up and HumanLayer’s harness engineering deep dive.
Improved: The Test Pyramid article was tightened – corrected attribution for “The Practical Test Pyramid” to Ham Vocke, fixed a duplicate link in Further Reading, and softened an uncited claim.
Improved: The YAGNI article got a clearer name for the “familiar-shape bias” force and a sharper closing paragraph on the optionality YAGNI preserves.
Improved: The Approval Policy article got a punchier Consequences section and cleaner cross-reference formatting.
Sources: Tightened intellectual lineage on two articles: Feedforward (corrected Harold S. Black’s patent history, dated Marshall Goldsmith’s essay, named the I. A. Richards lecture) and Smell (Code Smell) (added the origin WikiWikiWeb entry and Fowler’s bliki definition).
Meta: The thirty-first meta report sharpened the write-vs-edit balance to unblock a persistent write under-firing pattern. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 212
Articles changed since last deploy: 11 reader-visible cycles (2 new articles, 6 edits, 2 sources audits, 1 meta report)

2026-04-15

What’s New

New article: Test Pyramid – how to allocate testing effort across fast unit tests at the base and a small number of end-to-end tests at the top, with an agentic variant that reorganizes the layers by uncertainty tolerance.
Improved: The Code Smell article was tightened with a crisper opening, sharper voice, and an explicit nod to Fowler’s canonical catalog.
Improved: The Adversarial Cloaking article gained sharper prose and a fourth danger property – persistence by default – linking the threat to decades of search-engine cloaking.
Improved: The Model Routing article was refreshed for 2026 with cascade routing as a distinct fifth form, named production router infrastructure (RouteLLM, LiteLLM, Bifrost), GPT-5 internal routing as an industry signal, and new benchmark sources (RouterBench, RouterEval).
Structural: Tightened cross-linking across the Correctness, Testing & Evolution section so Related Patterns now resolve in both directions – 85 new reciprocal links help readers jump between connected ideas.
Sources: Added or tightened intellectual lineage on four articles: Service Level Objective (Google SRE book, the SRE Workbook, Alex Hidalgo’s Implementing SLOs), Test-Driven Development (TDAD research paper referenced by arXiv ID and benchmark), UX (Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, 2003 Steve Jobs profile), and Big Ball of Mud (Ward Cunningham’s original 1992 technical debt metaphor).
Meta: The thirty-first meta report rebalanced write and sources coefficients after sources dominated recent cycles. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 229
Coverage: 229 of 235 proposed concepts written (97%)
Articles changed since last deploy: 11 content cycles (1 new article, 3 edits, 1 groom, 4 sources audits, 1 meta, 1 no-op critique)

2026-04-12 (night)

What’s New

New article: Code Review – how having fresh eyes on every change catches what tests and the author’s own familiarity miss, and why agent-generated code makes review more important, not less.
New article: Adversarial Cloaking – how attackers detect AI agent visitors and serve them poisoned web pages invisible to human reviewers.
Improved: The Context Window article now reflects the 2026 token landscape (128K to 10M) with a note on attention degradation at million-token scale.
Improved: The Handoff article gained sharper prose, a concrete Stripe API migration scenario, and the “context dump fallacy” concept.
Improved: The Agent article gained the agentic-vs-vibe-coding distinction and 2026 production adoption data from Gartner and LangChain.
Improved: The Code Review, Human in the Loop, and Side Effect articles were polished for prose quality.
Improved: The Prompt Injection article gained Simon Willison’s Lethal Trifecta risk framework: three conditions that determine when injection becomes critically dangerous.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to four articles: Threat Model (Shostack, STRIDE, SDL), Observability (Kalman, Twitter, Honeycomb, Sridharan, Google Dapper), Sandbox (Bill Joy’s chroot, FreeBSD Jails, Java sandbox, seccomp), and Bottleneck (Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, Thomas Reid).
Structural: Prerequisite links across all articles now form a verified directed acyclic graph – following “Understand This First” links always leads to foundation concepts, never in circles.
Meta: Two meta reports confirmed the engine in stable equilibrium: sources coverage passed 50%, pipeline steady at 4, no parameter changes needed. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 217
Articles changed since last deploy: 20 cycles (2 new articles, 7 edits, 4 sources audits, 2 meta reports, 3 research rounds, 1 sweep, 1 no-op critique)

2026-04-12 (evening)

What’s New

New article: Feedback Flywheel – the cross-session retrospective loop that turns repeated corrections into permanent instruction-file rules, with first-pass acceptance rate as the metric.
New article: Organizational Debt – the accumulated cost of structural shortcuts in how teams are organized and decisions are made, compounding silently until the organization can’t move.
New article: Delegation Chain – the path authority follows from a human through agents, where each link can amplify or misdirect the original intent. Covers the confused deputy problem and practical chain-of-custody tracking.
New article: Cascade Failure – when one component’s failure triggers failures in others, creating a chain reaction that can bring down an entire system faster than anyone can respond.
New article: Handoff – how to transfer context, authority, and state between agents or sessions without losing what matters or carrying along what doesn’t.
Improved: The Domain Model article gained tighter prose and cleaner source attributions.
Improved: The Feedback Flywheel, Delegation Chain, Crossing the Chasm, Organizational Debt, and Cascade Failure articles were all polished for prose quality – tighter sentences, varied structure, and better paragraph rhythm.
Improved: Every page now has a single H1 heading tag for better SEO clarity, and all major sections now group their patterns under thematic sub-headings for easier scanning.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to Concurrency (Dijkstra, Hoare, Hewitt, Pike, async/await) and Human in the Loop (Wiener, Bainbridge, Shneiderman).
Meta: The engine confirmed its stochastic self-correction model (write recovered from zero to four articles in one period), validated the zero-pressure fix and sources gate, and bumped research priority to replenish a draining proposal pipeline. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 215
Articles changed since last deploy: 20 cycles (5 new articles, 6 edits, 2 sources audits, 1 groom audit, 1 meta report, 2 research rounds, 2 sweeps, 1 no-op critique)

2026-04-12

What’s New

New article: Context Rot – why agent output quietly degrades as inputs grow, even when the context window is nowhere near full, and what the existing context patterns are really fighting.
Improved: The Agent Sprawl antipattern gained tighter prose so the governance argument lands harder.
Improved: The Question Generation article was polished with tighter sentences and a reworked Sources section citing the intellectual lineage (Gause & Weinberg 1989, Brooks 1986).
Improved: The Context Rot article was edited for prose quality: varied rhythm, a fixed internal contradiction, and natural contractions throughout.
Sources: Five articles gained intellectual-lineage credits: User Feedback (Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Brad Myers, Unix rule of silence), KISS (Kelly Johnson, Hoare, Dijkstra, UNIX tradition, Rich Hickey), Premature Optimization (the full Knuth attribution story, Bentley, Gregg, Fowler), Coupling (Stevens, Myers, Constantine, Yourdon, Parnas), and Tool Poisoning (Invariant Labs, CyberArk, Elastic Security Labs, Simon Willison).
Structural: Added 62 missing reciprocal Related Patterns backlinks across two chapters: Operations and Change Management (29 links) and Product Judgment (33 links).
Meta: Two meta reports this period. The twenty-fifth confirmed the em-dash gate held for a second straight period and caught a competitor-name leak in a Sources section mid-cycle, fixing the write procedure on the spot. The twenty-sixth implemented a zero-pressure exclusion fix so the stochastic sampler no longer wastes cycles on actions with nothing to do. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 210
Articles changed since last deploy: 21 cycles (1 new article, 3 edits, 5 sources audits, 2 groom audits, 2 meta reports, 2 research rounds, 2 critique no-ops, 2 sweep no-ops, 2 freshness checks)

2026-04-11 (evening)

What’s New

New article: Business Capability – how to name what a business does (independent of teams, processes, and technology) so that strategy, software, and agent tasks all share the same stable anchors.
New article: Parallel Change – change an interface safely by adding the new form, migrating callers at their own pace, and removing the old form last.
New article: Deprecation – how to retire a feature, endpoint, or field on a schedule so callers have fair warning and you have evidence the removal is safe.
New article: Evolutionary Modernization – how to modernize legacy systems as an ongoing engineering practice instead of a risky big-bang rewrite.
New article: Agent Sprawl – the antipattern of autonomous agents proliferating across an organization faster than governance can track them, and how to escape it by treating the agent fleet as production infrastructure.
New article: Question Generation – a pattern for making the agent interview you (in categories, one at a time, with default answers) before it writes any code.
Improved: The AI Smell article gained a new team-dynamics smell – shipping agent-written code onto a reviewer without first reviewing it yourself – and a tighter discussion of authorship ownership.
Improved: The Thread-per-Task article gained a concrete before-and-after transcript showing how context scrolling degrades agent output and how a fresh thread restores quality.
Improved: The Deprecation, Parallel Change, Service Level Objective, Business Capability, and Evolutionary Modernization articles were all polished for prose quality – smoother rhythm, tighter sentences, and cleaner cross-reference lists.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to two articles: Least Privilege (Saltzer and Schroeder’s 1975 paper where the principle was coined, plus Mark Miller’s object-capability work) and Thread-per-Task (Drew Breunig, the Manus team, and Anthropic on context-window degradation).
Structural: Added 48 missing reciprocal Related Patterns backlinks across the Intent and Scope (21 links) and Agent Governance and Feedback (27 links) chapters, so every relationship is now visible from both sides.
Meta: Two meta reports this period. The first upgraded the write procedure’s em-dash check to a hard blocking gate after four drafts shipped over budget; the second confirmed the fix worked (new drafts shipped at 0 and 1 em dashes) and confirmed the recent sources starvation was ordinary variance, not a bug. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 209
Articles changed since last deploy: 24 cycles (6 new articles, 7 edits, 2 sources audits, 2 groom audits, 2 meta reports, plus research and no-op cycles)

2026-04-11

What’s New

New article: Thinnest Viable Platform – build the smallest internal platform that lets teams deliver autonomously, then grow it only when demand is real.
New article: Service Level Objective – how to pick a reliability target, measure how often you meet it, and spend the slack as an error budget that governs when to ship and when to slow down.
New article: Parallel Change – change an interface safely by adding the new form, migrating callers at their own pace, and removing the old form last.
New article: Business Capability – how to name what a business does (independent of teams, processes, and technology) so that strategy, software, and agent tasks all share the same stable anchors.
Improved: The Strangler Fig article gained tighter prose, better paragraph rhythm in the Consequences section, and a new cross-reference to Decomposition.
Improved: The Thinnest Viable Platform article was edited for tighter prose and more concrete framing of the agent governance example.
Structural: Renamed the Feedback article to User Feedback to clearly distinguish it from Feedback Loop; updated all cross-references.
Meta: The engine cut the sources coefficient last cycle and discovered sources fired zero times in ten cycles, so it raised the coefficient back. Write, meanwhile, surged to three new articles in one period by harvesting children from a structural gap analysis. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 202
Articles changed since last deploy: 10 (4 new + 2 edits + 1 structural rename + 1 meta + 1 research + 1 groom)

2026-04-10 (night)

What’s New

New article: Research, Plan, Implement – a three-phase workflow that separates understanding from planning from execution, catching agent misunderstandings before they get cemented into code.
New article: Platform as a Product – how to run your internal developer platform with the same discipline you’d use for a product with paying customers.
New article: Strangler Fig – how to replace a legacy system incrementally by building new functionality alongside it, routing traffic piece by piece, until the old system can be switched off.
Improved: The Aggregate article gained tighter prose and new cross-references to Invariant and Instruction File.
Improved: The Architecture article gained tighter prose and new cross-references to Design Doc, Domain Model, Cognitive Load, and Coupling.
Improved: The Feedback Loop article gained tighter prose and more varied sentence structures.
Improved: The Determinism article gained tighter prose, prerequisite links, and a new cross-reference to Test.
Improved: The Research, Plan, Implement article gained tighter prose and cleaner sentence structures.
Improved: The Test-Driven Development article gained a new research finding on how agents use TDD, tighter prose, and cross-references to Requirement and Verification Loop.
Improved: The Platform as a Product article gained tighter prose and better paragraph structure in the examples.
Improved: The Hook article gained tighter prose, a new Sources section tracing the concept from the Gang of Four through Git and React to agentic harnesses, and a cross-reference to the Ralph Wiggum Loop failure mode.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to three articles: Plan Mode (ReAct through Plan-and-Execute to modern coding tools), Parallelization (Amdahl’s Law through Anthropic’s workflow taxonomy), and Determinism (Turing, Rabin and Scott, and Bernhardt’s “functional core, imperative shell”).
Structural: Added 17 missing cross-reference backlinks to improve navigation between Design Heuristics articles and their related patterns across the encyclopedia.
Meta: The engine detected a corpus stabilization signal as edit improvements shrink, reduced the sources coefficient as tracked coverage nears completion, and is watching the article pipeline as research goes quiet. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 198
Articles changed since last deploy: 22 (3 new + 8 edits + 3 sources audits + 1 groom + 2 meta + 1 research + sweep no-op)

2026-04-10 (evening)

What’s New

New article: Feedback Loop – the architectural primitive that lets systems self-correct, from CI pipelines to agentic verification workflows.
New article: Aggregate – how to cluster entities and value objects into consistency boundaries with a single root guarding all access.
New article: Generator-Evaluator – split code creation and code critique into separate agents so neither role can blind the other.
Improved: The Plan Mode article gained a concrete agent interaction transcript showing plan-then-execute in action.
Improved: The Parallelization article gained a concrete interaction example showing three agents building independent API endpoints in parallel worktrees, then merging cleanly.
Improved: The Context Engineering article gained a concrete interaction example showing how deliberate file selection and context ordering produce better agent output on the first try.
Improved: The Verification Loop article gained a concrete interaction example showing an agent iterating through test failures after adding rate limiting.
Improved: The Subagent article gained a concrete interaction example showing how a parent agent dispatches an exploration subagent and uses its compact summary to plan next steps.
Improved: The A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) article now covers the version 1.0 release, five production-ready SDKs, and tighter prose throughout.
Improved: The Generator-Evaluator article gained tighter prose and the AgentCoder paper as a source for multi-agent code generation benchmarks.
Improved: The Value Object article gained tighter prose and better paragraph flow.
Improved: The Protocol article gained tighter prose and new cross-references to MCP and A2A.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to three articles: API (Joshua Bloch’s design principles and Roy Fielding’s REST dissertation), Algorithmic Complexity (Big-O notation from its 1894 origins through Knuth and Hartmanis-Stearns), and Protocol (TCP and the end-to-end principle through HTTP to MCP and A2A).
Meta: The engine confirmed its edit-dominance prediction. A single critique pass added concrete interaction transcripts to four agentic articles in one period. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 195
Articles changed since last deploy: 20 (3 new + 9 edits + 3 sources audits + 1 groom + 2 meta + 1 research + 1 critique)

2026-04-10

What’s New

New article: Value Object – the complement to Entity, covering objects defined by what they contain rather than who they are, with practical guidance for domain modeling and agentic workflows.
New article: A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) – how agents from different vendors discover each other’s capabilities and collaborate on tasks through a standard protocol.
Improved: The Harness (Agentic) article gained tighter prose and Sources tracing the concept from Boeckeler’s “harness engineering” discipline to Russell & Norvig’s agent loop.
Improved: The Retrieval article gained tighter prose, varied scenario framing, and clearer consequences.
Improved: The Feedforward article gained clearer prose, added security scanning as a feedforward example, and fixed a source attribution.
Improved: The Entity article gained tighter prose, better paragraph structure, and clearer guidance on telling agents which concepts carry identity.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to eight articles: Algorithm (al-Khwarizmi through Turing to Knuth), DRY (Hunt & Thomas through Beck to Codd), Product-Market Fit (Rachleff through Andreessen to Ellis and Blank), Prompt (GPT-3 few-shot through chain-of-thought), Separation of Concerns (Dijkstra through Parnas to Reenskaug’s MVC), Test (Dijkstra through Myers to Cohn and Beck), Tool (ReAct through Toolformer to OpenAI function calling), and Verification Loop (Wiener’s cybernetics through Beck’s TDD).
Meta: The engine caught sources audits consuming half of all cycles and rebalanced, putting new article writing back in the lead. Separately, the action distribution reached its healthiest balance yet after a self-correcting edit plateau. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 195
Articles changed since last deploy: 20 (2 new + 4 edits + 8 sources audits + 1 groom + 2 meta + 1 research + 1 critique)

2026-04-09

What’s New

New article: Retrieval – how agents pull relevant documents from an external corpus at query time, the pattern behind RAG.
Improved: The MCP article now has corrected specification timeline (March and June 2025 releases separated) and coverage of the November 2025 spec release introducing the Tasks primitive.
Improved: The Specification article gained a new section showing how to use thin written specs as runnable prototypes, with a worked example of a customer-deduplication tool built through three iterations.
Improved: The Premature Optimization article gained a top-of-page “Understand This First” section linking to Performance Envelope and Observability.
Improved: The Stream-Aligned Team article gained a clearer comparison between stream-aligned and component-aligned agent setups, with the payments-team scenario rewritten as a clean before/after.
Improved: The Inverse Conway Maneuver article gained clearer paragraphs in the Solution section and a sharpened Consequences section that leads with the specific risk that agents won’t tell you when boundaries are wrong.
Improved: The Coding Convention article gained paragraph splits in Problem, Solution, and How It Plays Out for easier reading.
Sources: The Context Window article now traces the concept to the Transformer architecture paper, the “Lost in the Middle” research on positional attention bias, and the coining of “context engineering.”
Structural: Added a full table of contents to the cover page to fix mobile navigation – visitors were landing on the cover, seeing only art and a paragraph, and bouncing because the sidebar TOC was hidden behind the hamburger menu. Also added a site-wide meta description for better search engine results.
Meta: The engine spent 10 cycles editing without writing a single new article – its first write-free period – because clearing a draft backlog was mathematically more urgent. With only 2 drafts left (an all-time low), the balance shifted back toward new content. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 193
Articles changed since last deploy: 19 (1 new + 5 edits + 1 sources audit + 1 groom + 1 meta + cover TOC restructure)

2026-04-07

What’s New

New article: Coding Convention – how to capture your team’s code style as a written, living artifact that both humans and AI agents can read and follow, and why the 2026 “naming renaissance” made this newly important.
New article: Entity – how to recognize the things in your domain that have identity (customers, orders, invoices) and why keeping that identity stable matters when an AI agent is updating your code.
New article: Stream-Aligned Team – why organizing teams around value streams instead of technical layers produces better software, and how the same principle applies when scoping AI agents.
New article: Enabling Team – how temporary, teaching-oriented teams help stream-aligned teams adopt new capabilities like AI agent workflows without creating permanent dependencies.
New article: Inverse Conway Maneuver – how to reshape your teams (or agents) to produce the software architecture you actually want, instead of the one your org chart would impose.
Improved: The Specification article now shows how to use thin written specs as runnable prototypes that agents execute to surface unknown requirements, with a worked example following a team that discovers what their customer-deduplication tool actually needs to do.
Improved: The Memory article gained decay heuristics that keep memories self-maintaining, automated extraction that harvests lessons from your conversation history, and a cold-start guide for the first week of use.
Improved: The Ralph Wiggum Loop article gained five named failure modes and their fixes, so you can diagnose what went wrong when your loop stops converging.
Improved: The Compaction article gained new detail on how harnesses configure automatic compaction (reserve token thresholds, API endpoints) and a clearer explanation of the tradeoff between automatic and manual triggers.
Improved: The Bounded Autonomy article gained a longer-horizon scenario showing how early restrictive policies evolve into earned autonomy, plus new guidance on treating tier regressions as a healthy feedback signal rather than a setback.
Improved: The Approval Fatigue article gained a sharper opening, a connection to the forty-year-old “alert fatigue” pattern from security operations, and a new cross-reference to Blast Radius.
Improved: The Shadow Agent article gained a sharper intent line and a clearer explanation of what makes shadow agents worse than shadow IT (they take actions, not just hold data).
Improved: The Big Ball of Mud article gained a sharper intent line, smoother prose, and Martin Fowler’s Strangler Fig pattern in the Sources.
Improved: The Metric article gained tighter prose, sharper analysis of why traditional metrics mislead in AI-assisted workflows, and cross-references to Verification Loop and Instruction File.
Sources: The Architecture article now credits Perry and Wolf for founding the field, Shaw and Garlan for the first textbook, Martin Fowler and Ralph Johnson for the modern “decisions costly to reverse” framing, and Christopher Alexander for the pattern-language approach. The Continuous Integration article credits Grady Booch for coining the term, Kent Beck for formalizing the practice in Extreme Programming, and Jez Humble and David Farley for extending CI into continuous delivery. The Eval article credits OpenAI’s Evals framework, the HumanEval benchmark, and Princeton’s SWE-bench as foundational contributions to how we measure agent performance.
Structural: The Approval Fatigue, Shadow Agent, Technical Debt, and Big Ball of Mud antipatterns now appear on their section landing pages, where readers browsing a topic area can discover them alongside the patterns they complement.
Meta: The engine found a bookkeeping bug where 41 articles had Sources sections in their files but weren’t marked as audited in state, causing the audit action to re-pick articles whose work was already done – now fixed with a backfill and new rules that prevent future drift. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 192
Coverage: 192 of 217 proposed concepts written (88%)
Articles changed since last deploy: 18 (5 new + 9 edits + 3 sources audits + 1 groom + 1 meta backfill)

2026-04-06 (afternoon)

What’s New

New article: Architecture Fitness Function – automated checks that catch structural drift before it compounds, keeping your architecture aligned with intent.
New article: Ownership – who is responsible for this code, and what happens when nobody can answer that question.
New article: RAG Poisoning – how attackers corrupt the knowledge bases AI agents retrieve from, causing agents to treat fabricated information as verified fact.
New article: Shift-Left Feedback – move quality checks earlier in the agent’s workflow so mistakes are caught while they’re still cheap to fix.
New article: Metric – what makes a number worth tracking, why AI-generated code makes measurement more important than ever, and how to avoid vanity metrics.
Improved: The Garbage Collection article gained empirical data on agent-caused code drift, a new measurement component, and a third scenario showing how sweep logs surface root causes.
Improved: The Agent Trap article added a section on dynamic cloaking attacks and notes on the unresolved legal liability question.
Improved: The Vibe Coding article added the concept of comprehension debt, new CVE data, and a third scenario showing how vibe-coded projects become unmaintainable.
Improved: The Model Routing article added cascading as a routing strategy and restructured the examples for clarity.
Improved: The Printf Debugging article added a stronger explanation of why this is the default debugging method for AI coding agents.
Improved: The Team Cognitive Load, Architecture Fitness Function, RAG Poisoning, Ownership, and Shift-Left Feedback articles received prose quality passes.
Sources: The YAGNI article now traces the principle back to Kent Beck’s C3 project and the Extreme Programming community. The Prompt Injection article credits the researchers who discovered and named the vulnerability.
Meta: The engine’s write throughput hit an all-time high after rebalancing, but sources audits dropped to zero – adjusted the weight to find the sweet spot. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 187
Coverage: 187 of 216 proposed concepts written (87%)
Articles changed since last deploy: 19 (5 new + 10 edits + 2 sources audits + 2 meta)

2026-04-06 (overnight)

What’s New

New article: Garbage Collection – how recurring agent-driven sweeps keep a codebase from drifting away from its own standards.
New article: Agent Trap – the umbrella concept for adversarial content that exploits AI agents by corrupting their environment rather than attacking the model itself.
New article: Vibe Coding – the most talked-about antipattern in agentic coding, and why generating code you don’t understand is a trap that works until it doesn’t.
New article: Model Routing – how to match AI models to tasks so you spend your budget where it matters.
New article: Printf Debugging – the oldest and most universal debugging technique, and the one AI coding agents reach for instinctively.
New article: Best Current Practice – every recommendation carries its own expiration warning, and this matters when AI agents trained on older data may suggest stale approaches.
Improved: The Agent Teams article gained a new Orchestration Topologies section covering the four coordination patterns used in production multi-agent systems.
Improved: The Logging article gained a section on logging at boundaries – the highest-value instrumentation points in any system.
Improved: The Happy Path article added alternative names (Golden Path, Sunny Day Scenario) and better paragraph structure.
Improved: The Ralph Wiggum Loop, Bounded Context, and Externalized State articles received prose quality passes.
Sources: The Red/Green TDD, Cohesion, and Subagent articles now credit their intellectual origins.
Meta: The engine’s action mix rebalanced after a coefficient experiment, and a dormant action type is being retired after 40+ idle cycles. See the Meta Report.

Metrics

Total articles: 171
Coverage: 171 of 209 proposed concepts written (82%)
Articles changed since last deploy: 15 (6 new + 6 edits + 3 sources audits)

2026-04-06 (late night)

What’s New

New article: Approval Fatigue – when approval requests come faster than a human can genuinely evaluate them, oversight degrades into rubber-stamping.
New article: Shadow Agent – an AI agent operating inside your organization without anyone in governance knowing it exists.
New article: Tool Poisoning – malicious tool descriptions that hijack agent behavior through the tool discovery channel.
New article: Big Ball of Mud – the most common software architecture in practice: a haphazardly structured, sprawling, duct-taped system that resists all attempts at understanding.
New article: Premature Optimization – spending effort to make code faster before you know where the bottleneck is, trading clarity for speed that nobody needed.
New article: Technical Debt – the accumulated cost of shortcuts, deferred maintenance, and expedient decisions that make future changes harder and slower.
Visual: Antipattern articles now display a distinctive red prohibition sign admonishment, distinguishing them from patterns (green checkmark) and concepts (blue info icon).
Improved: Local graph widget now shows inverted labels for incoming edges, making relationship direction clearer.
Cross-references: Added reciprocal Related Patterns links across 30 existing articles connecting them to the six new antipatterns.

Metrics

Total articles: 165
Coverage: 165 of 206 proposed concepts written (80%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 37 (6 new antipatterns + 30 reciprocal link updates + 1 graph fix)

2026-04-06 (evening)

What’s New

New feature: Pattern Map – an interactive force-directed knowledge graph showing all 159 articles and 893 connections. Search, zoom, hover to highlight connections, drag to rearrange, click to navigate. Every article page now has a local graph widget below the type marker showing its immediate neighbors.
New article: Team Cognitive Load – how the mental effort of understanding and maintaining systems limits what teams and agents can effectively own.
New article: Ralph Wiggum Loop – the embarrassingly simple pattern of restarting an agent with fresh context after each unit of work, using a plan file instead of an orchestration framework.
New article: Happy Path – the default scenario where everything works, and why recognizing it is the first step toward building software that handles the real world.
Improved: The Checkpoint article gained coverage of ephemeral environments as a checkpoint strategy. The Bounded Autonomy article now covers dynamic trust-score de-escalation. The Model article now covers reasoning capabilities, multimodal input, and model selection guidance. The MCP article now covers Linux Foundation governance, Streamable HTTP transport, and OAuth 2.1 authentication.
Sources: Added intellectual lineage to the Code Smell, Agent, and AI Smell articles.
Infrastructure: Social preview images for link sharing, external links open in new tabs, site now indexable by search engines, sitemap live for crawlers.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s eighth self-evaluation.

Metrics

Total articles: 159
Coverage: 159 of 191 proposed concepts written (83%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 15 (3 new articles + 4 targeted edits + 3 sources audits + 5 infrastructure)

2026-04-06 (morning)

What’s New

New article: Ralph Wiggum Loop – the embarrassingly simple pattern of restarting an agent with fresh context after each unit of work, using a plan file instead of an orchestration framework.
New article: Agent Teams – how multiple AI agents coordinate through shared task lists and peer messaging, scaling agentic work beyond what one human can direct.
New article: Externalized State – how to store an agent’s plan, progress, and intermediate results in files so workflows survive interruptions and stay auditable.
New article: Logging – how to record what your software does as it runs, covering structured logs, severity levels, and why logging is the primary way both humans and AI agents understand runtime behavior.
New article: Happy Path – the default scenario where everything works, and why recognizing it is the first step toward building software that handles the real world.
Improved: The Context Engineering article now covers four named operations (select, compress, order, isolate), signal-to-noise framing, and production-scale concerns like cache efficiency.
Improved: The MCP article now covers current governance (Linux Foundation), Streamable HTTP transport, OAuth 2.1 authentication, security threats, and adoption metrics.
Improved: The Model article now covers reasoning capabilities, multimodal input, model selection guidance, and intellectual sources.
Improved: The Subagent article gained three named use case categories (exploration, parallel processing, specialist roles), a warning against overuse, and guidance on using cheaper models for subagent tasks.
Improved: The Agent article gained cross-section links to Least Privilege, Boundary, and Test, connecting the book’s central agentic concept to foundational patterns.
Improved: The AI Smell article gained a new section on agent struggle as a code quality signal – when your agent fails repeatedly, the problem may be your code, not the agent.
Improved: The Steering Loop article gained tighter prose, a new section on completion gates, and proper source attribution.
Improved: The Bounded Autonomy article gained tighter prose and added coverage of dynamic trust-score de-escalation.
Improved: The Checkpoint, Design Doc, Architecture Decision Record, and Conway’s Law articles received prose quality improvements.
Improved: Added intellectual lineage to the Crossing the Chasm and Skill articles.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s seventh self-evaluation: both previous hypotheses confirmed, coverage velocity doubled, and the new stochastic selection system shows early promise.

Metrics

Total articles: 165
Coverage: 165 of 200 proposed concepts written (83%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 19 (5 new articles + 12 targeted edits + 2 sources audits)

2026-04-06

What’s New

New article: Checkpoint – how to insert verification gates into agentic workflows so agents catch errors at each stage instead of building on broken foundations.
New article: Architecture Decision Record – how to capture design decisions so future readers (human or AI) don’t have to guess why the system is built this way.
Improved: Every article now displays a visual marker identifying it as either a Pattern (a solution you can apply) or a Concept (an idea to recognize and understand), helping readers orient instantly.
Improved: The Feedback Sensor article received tighter prose, a new Sources section, and stronger motivation for why automated checks matter.
Improved: Added a Sources section to the Memory article, tracing the concept’s origins from cognitive psychology through modern AI agent memory systems.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s sixth self-evaluation: all signals stable or improving, no process changes needed.

Metrics

Total articles: 153
Coverage: 153 of 188 proposed concepts written (81%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 156 (2 new articles + 1 targeted edit + 1 sources audit + 152 via entry type markers sweep)

2026-04-05 (late)

What’s New

New article: Bounded Autonomy – how to calibrate agent freedom based on the consequence and reversibility of each action, from full autonomy for safe tasks to human-only for critical operations.
Improved: The Naming article received tighter prose, proper source attribution crediting Robert C. Martin and Phil Karlton, and a clearer presentation of naming principles.
Improved: The Refactor article now credits the people who originated the ideas it teaches – from Opdyke and Johnson coining the term in 1992, through Fowler’s canonical catalog, to Beck’s integration with testing.
Structural: Section index pages for Socio-Technical Systems and Agent Governance and Feedback now show a “Work in Progress” notice indicating more entries are on the way.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s fifth self-evaluation: the draft-pressure fix is confirmed working, and the restructure action’s weight continues its planned decay.

Metrics

Total articles: 158
Coverage: 158 of 192 proposed concepts written (82%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 3 (1 targeted edit + 1 sources audit + 1 new article)

2026-04-06

What’s New

New article: Design Doc – how to translate requirements into a technical plan before building starts, and why this matters even more when an AI agent is the builder.
Improved: The Skill article gained a new section on how skills evolve from ad-hoc instructions into reliable team workflows, plus a new scenario showing code review skill evolution in practice.
Improved: The Ubiquitous Language article received proper source attribution, tighter prose in the agentic workflow section, and a new cross-link to the Instruction File pattern.
Improved: Added intellectual lineage to the Feedforward article, tracing the concept from 1920s control theory through Marshall Goldsmith’s coaching framework to Birgitta Boeckeler’s guides-and-sensors model.
Structural: Improved cross-reference navigation in the Security and Trust section – 14 missing reciprocal links added so readers can follow connections in both directions.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s fourth self-evaluation: a procedural bug was keeping unreviewed articles from getting edited, now fixed with a clearer priority gate.

Metrics

Total articles: 158
Coverage: 158 of 189 proposed concepts written (84%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 10 (2 targeted edits + 1 sources audit + 1 groom pass across 6 articles)

2026-04-05 (evening)

What’s New

New article: Conway’s Law – why software systems end up mirroring the communication structure of the teams that build them, and how to use this force deliberately when organizing both human teams and AI agents. This is the first article in the new Socio-Technical Systems section.
Improved: Updated the Prompt Injection article with 2025-2026 developments: direct vs. indirect injection, MCP attack surfaces, instruction hierarchy defenses, multimodal vectors, and detection techniques like canary tokens.
Improved: Every pattern entry now shows prerequisite concepts at the top of the page – follow the links to drill down to foundational ideas before reading advanced ones.
Improved: The Test-Driven Development article now credits Kent Beck, the Extreme Programming community, Robert C. Martin, and Martin Fowler for the ideas it teaches.
Structural: Fixed paragraph line spacing to match the intended readability standard across all article pages.
Other: Updated the Meta Report with the engine’s second self-evaluation: the rotation rebalancing worked, all three hypotheses were resolved, and a course correction prevents the idea pipeline from drying up.

Metrics

Total articles: 149
Coverage: 149 of 169 proposed concepts written (88%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 107 (2 targeted edits + 1 sources audit + 104 via Understand This First sweep)

2026-04-05

What’s New

New article: Domain Model – how to capture the concepts, rules, and relationships of a business problem so that both humans and AI agents share the same understanding.
New article: Ubiquitous Language – how a shared vocabulary drawn from the business domain keeps developers, stakeholders, and AI agents aligned on what every term means.
New article: Naming – how choosing clear, consistent identifiers for code elements matters more in the agent era, where AI amplifies whatever naming patterns it finds.
New article: Bounded Context – how drawing explicit boundaries around parts of your system keeps domain models focused and prevents vocabulary collisions, especially when directing AI agents.
New article: Feedforward – how to steer an AI agent toward correct output before it acts, using instruction files, specifications, and computational checks.
New article: Feedback Sensor – how automated checks after each agent action detect mistakes and drive self-correction, from fast type checkers to LLM-based code reviewers.
New article: Steering Loop – how the closed cycle of act, sense, and adjust turns feedforward controls and feedback sensors into a system that converges on correct code.
New article: Harnessability – why some codebases are easier for AI agents to work in than others, and how type systems, module boundaries, and codified conventions determine the ceiling on agent effectiveness.
Improved: Added example prompts to 129 pattern entries, showing readers what it looks like to apply each concept when directing an AI coding agent.
Improved: The Harnessability article gained a practical optimization checklist – six concrete steps to make your codebase more tractable for AI agents.
Improved: The Domain Model article gained a new section on encoding behavior in domain objects, tighter prose, a corrected alias, and a Sources section crediting Eric Evans and Martin Fowler.
Improved: The Feedforward article received tighter prose and a corrected reference link.
Other: Published the first Meta Report entry, documenting how the improvement engine measures and adjusts its own process.

Metrics

Total articles: 155
Coverage: 155 of 178 proposed concepts written (87%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 132 (4 targeted edits + 1 sources audit + 129 via example-prompts sweep)

2026-04-04

What’s New

New article: Specification covers how to write what a system should do precisely enough for a human or an agent to build it correctly.
Improved: The Specification article received tighter prose, a unique epigraph, and new content on the three levels of spec-driven development.
Improved: Five core agentic coding articles (Context Window, Context Engineering, Prompt, Agent, Tool) now include example prompts showing how to apply each pattern when directing an AI agent.

Metrics

Total articles: 140
Coverage: 140 of 200 proposed concepts written (70%)
Articles edited since last deploy: 6

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