Hoard things you know how to do – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog
March 2, 2026
Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I’ve found useful in my career without them. Here’s a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do.
A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what’s possible and what isn’t, and having at least a rough idea of how those things can be accomplished.
I think this is a really good observation by Simon Willison that knowing what is broadly possible and perhaps more importantly what is possibly impossible are very important capabilities when working with agentic systems.
