10 lessons from 4 months as an AI engineer: orchestration and context engineering are the job
Ok-Organization4300 · reddit · 2026-11-09
An AI engineer distills 10 lessons from their first 4 months, arguing the job is shifting from writing code to orchestrating agents: move to cloud coding agents (Claude Code/Codex) with Gmail/Slack context; write specs like you're briefing a junior dev (voice-to-text helps); orchestration loops that turn specs into production PRs are where leverage lies; context engineering is the real bottleneck; solid software engineering matters more, not less; never measure productivity in LOC; keep understanding your codebase via agent-generated diagrams and docs; build multi-layer agent reviews before human eyes; own your agent loop and harness rather than blindly trusting LangChain/CrewAI, using evals to decide scaffolding changes; and treat agent skills as a way to transfer real expertise, not collectibles.
More from coding & agent
- dair-ai founder: own your evals — public benchmarks won't tell you what to ship — dair_ai · 2026-11-09
- Open-source video-to-game: agent rebuilds 31 playable games from clips, ~$6 each — songguoxiansen · 2026-11-09
- 'Agent swarms' is funny branding — you wouldn't call coworkers a swarm — round · 2026-11-09
- 179 blocked tool calls were mostly false positives; a re-verification loop is coming — yb2698 · 2026-11-09
- RL-trained harness adapters drop for LFM3, LFM2.5 and TwiL-8B to boost agentic coding — yb2698 · 2026-11-09
- 179 reward-hacking tool calls blocked during agent RL training, just 0.04% of total — yb2698 · 2026-11-09