Trust Has to Live Somewhere - August 2026

Aight! August newsletter time!

A coding agent can write the code. It does not get to decide the code is correct.

That is the thread running through most of what I worked on this month: one new post, more guardrails in my-pi, two mcpick releases, and a load of site plumbing.

Agentic Engineering

• Agentic engineering: a practical guide to reliable coding agents

“Agentic engineering” is new enough that everyone has their own definition. Mine is simple: agents can do substantial engineering work, but trust has to live outside the agent.

The post pulls together how I handle context, project rules, task boundaries, validation, evidence, secrets and review. It also covers what keeps failing, loading everything into context and letting the agent review its own work.

If you want the full setup, it is all in the post. The short version is this: the model is the fast, probabilistic worker. The repository, tools, checks and review process are the engineering system.

my-pi

The biggest my-pi change was adding an assessment step before risky work gets a harness.

The agent now has to investigate in read-only mode, show the repository evidence, identify what already exists, reject weak options and recommend the smallest useful change. The user then decides whether it should work directly, use a harness or stop.

That is mostly me trying to prevent a bad assumption becoming a very official-looking plan.

I also added prompt preset management in the TUI, TypeScript 7 support to the LSP tools, tighter output redaction, and a few smaller fixes. The experimental Factory workflow now stays off unless I explicitly ask to evaluate it. Building a thing does not mean it has earned a place in the default workflow.

• Take a look at my-pi

mcpick

mcpick had two releases this month: v0.1.0 and v0.2.0.

It started as a quick way to switch MCP servers on and off. It now checks client configs, spots plaintext secrets and unpinned servers, previews changes with --dry-run, restores backups, searches the official MCP Registry, and supports Claude Desktop and Codex CLI.

It can also run as an MCP server over stdio.

Site Bits

This site moved to the SvelteKit 3 prerelease and Node’s built-in node:sqlite. I also added Bluesky replies to posts, including images, and wired up Standard.site publishing.

Most readers should notice none of the migration work. That is the ideal outcome.

Other Open Source Bits

• mcp-omnisearch added Tavily crawl, map, extraction and asynchronous research
• nopeek tightened secret auditing and now fails closed for more secret-assignment output
• the usual dependency conveyor belt continued across everything

Fin

So yeah, one post, a lot of guardrail work, and several tools getting safer rather than merely getting more features.

If you want more detail, the links are all up there. Or come say hi on Bluesky.

Thanks for reading!