Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini. https://addyosmani.com Cognitive offloading is delegating to the AI and still owning the answer. Cognitive surrender is when the AI's output quietly becomes your output and there is nothing left to check. For software engineers the line between the two moves under your feet most days, and most of us are crossing it without noticing. Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skills encodes those senior-engineer behaviors as workflows the agent has to follow, with anti-rationalization built in. Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-skills/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-skills/ A long-running agent can keep making progress over hours, days, or weeks. It can do this across many context windows and sandboxes, recover from failure, leave structured artifacts behind, and resume where it left off. Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/long-running-agents/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/long-running-agents/ A coding agent is the model plus everything you build around it: prompts, tools, context policies, hooks, sandboxes, feedback loops. Harness engineering is the discipline of treating that scaffolding as a first-class artifact, and tightening it every time the agent slips. Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-harness-engineering/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-harness-engineering/ AI coding agents consume documentation fundamentally differently from humans. If you're still optimizing only for human readers, you're leaving a growing share of your audience invisible to your tooling. Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-engine-optimization/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-engine-optimization/ Running multiple agents in parallel is not just a question of throughput. It is a new kind of cognitive labor that requires managing multiple mental models, continuous judgment calls, and an ambient anxiety tax Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-parallel-agents/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-parallel-agents/ The shift from conductor to orchestrator: how to coordinate teams of AI coding agents in real-world software workflows. From subagents to Agent Teams to purpose-built orchestration tools, this talk covers the patterns, tools, and discipline required to thrive in the era of agentic engineering. Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/code-agent-orchestra/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/code-agent-orchestra/ Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/comprehension-debt/ Software engineering is not about writing code anymore. It is about building the factory that builds your software. Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/ Two papers published in early 2026 suggest you might have just made your agent slower, more expensive, and no more accurate. The right mental model is to treat AGENTS.md as a living list of codebase smells you haven't fixed yet, not a permanent configuration. Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agents-md/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agents-md/