Linear walkthroughs – Agentic Engineering Patterns
February 26, 2026
Sometimes it’s useful to have a coding agent give you a structured walkthrough of a codebase.
Maybe it’s existing code you need to get up to speed on, maybe it’s your own code that you’ve forgotten the details of, or maybe you vibe coded the whole thing and need to understand how it actually works.
Frontier models with the right agent harness can construct a detailed walkthrough to help you understand how code works.
Simon Willison is working on what he calls a “book-shaped” project to document agentic coding patterns.
Here he talks about how he gets systems to give him a linear walkthrough of the code that he has developed. He’s not doing line-by-line code reviews, but here he gets a sense of how the system overall works.
