Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini. https://addyosmani.com You don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that does the prompting for you. It's five building blocks plus somewhere to keep notes, and Codex and Claude Code both have all five now. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may have never wrote: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it is. If you're lucky, some of this exists scattered in team documents or discussions, but it's likely incomplete. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and agentic engineering makes it the most expensive. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ Starting more agents is easy now. However, more agents running doesn't mean more of you available - your cognitive bandwidth doesn't parallelize. All the judgement to actually steer them and merge the code they write into the codebase still has to route through exactly one serial processor which is just you. Orchestration tax is basically the price you pay for forgetting this and the only real fix is to start architecting your own attention like you architect any concurrent system. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/ Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading future capability for present-day speed, and the tools won't force us to do otherwise. That part has to come from you. Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/dont-outsource-learning/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/dont-outsource-learning/ 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/