Radical Geek field guide
Radical Geek's Guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns
A practical pattern catalogue for teams building reliable AI-assisted software delivery workflows.
Why this guide
An agent can produce a convincing patch very quickly. That does not tell you whether it understood the work, chose the right boundary, tested the risky path, or left enough evidence for somebody else to trust the result.
This catalogue is drawn from building agent teams that plan, make changes, test, review, escalate and report through inspectable engineering systems. It is designed to be used while shaping a real workflow, not admired as a collection of diagrams.
Use the patterns as a working catalogue. Start with the failure mode in front of you, then add only the structure needed to make the work inspectable and repeatable.
What you will leave with
A guide built to be used.
- 01
Turn agent work into small, inspectable delivery steps rather than one opaque run.
- 02
Choose patterns for planning, delegation, model routing, review and escalation.
- 03
Build verification and evidence into the workflow before work reaches a human reviewer.
- 04
Connect agent activity to CI, merge readiness, deployment and rollback.
Inside the guide
The working ground it covers.
- Planning, decomposition and context patterns
- Specialist agents, sub-agents and hand-offs
- Model routing and escalation paths
- Adversarial review and verification gates
- CI, merge readiness and deployment evidence
- Safe tool use and human control points