Engineering Discipline in the Age of Agents

AI collapsed the distance between design and code, but not the fidelity problem. This module reframes the job around standards, decomposition, verification, and planning work that agents can actually execute.

Break complex systems into independent layers, keep business logic in the core, and use ports and adapters as the standard shape for code humans and agents can both reason about.

Build the ladder of checks that lets agents correct their work and lets you accept code you did not read line by line: unit tests, acceptance tests, gates, telemetry, and human review.

Build the small shared vocabulary humans and agents need for delegation: commands, events, queries, handlers, aggregates, entities, value objects, domain services, ports, and read models.

Learn to decompose one complex flow into bounded steps, choose orchestration or choreography, and understand how the same choice later applies to coordinating agents.

Use modules, integration contracts, and the modular-monolith default to create agent-task-sized units that can evolve without collisions.

Set up a pipeline where nothing reaches production unverified, using trunk-based development, sensor gates, and progressive delivery to make agent-speed changes survivable.

Close the loop from telemetry to diagnosis, fixes, shipping, and discovery, so production becomes the outermost rung of the feedback ladder.

Move from a working prototype to story maps, acceptance criteria, functional design, and agent-sized delivery tasks without mistaking prototype code for shippable code.

Give agents the tools, standards, and bounded context they need to perform delegated work while checking themselves against the project harness.

Apply delegation boundaries, integration contracts, and orchestration-versus-choreography choices to real agent coordination.

Review for intent and coverage, keep humans in charge of the failure model, and use production observability as the substrate for AI-assisted debugging.