Patterns

Scout-and-Wave, Part 4: Trust Is Structural
The Scaffold Agent doesn’t add capability. It restores a review gate that was cosmetically present but structurally absent. The worktree isolation trip wire catches failures that were invisible until merge time. Neither fixes a bug in the traditional sense. Both fix trust.
Scout-and-Wave, Part 2: What Dogfooding Taught Us
Scout-and-wave v0.1.0 worked. Then we ran it on documentation agents, measured the overhead honestly, and learned that raw agent count is a bad proxy for when parallelism is worth it. This post covers the audit-fix-audit loop, the dogfooding experiment that confirmed SAW was 88% slower than sequential for that job, SAW Quick mode for small disjoint work, and the bootstrap problem for new projects.
Scout-and-Wave, Part 3: Five Failures, Five Fixes
The scout refused to write the IMPL doc. Forty-five percent of agents arrived at work already done. The skill file grew to 400 lines with no separation of concerns. Each failure drove a specific fix — and each fix is traceable to an exact incident in an exact run. This is the scout prompt’s bug tracker.
Scout-and-Wave: A Coordination Pattern for Parallel AI Agents
Naive parallel agents step on each other. The scout-and-wave pattern solves this by front-loading dependency mapping: one throwaway agent identifies seams and builds a living coordination artifact before any implementation begins. Development then proceeds in waves, each consuming and updating the artifact for the next.
Glob Patterns: Complete Syntax Reference with Examples
Part 2: A comprehensive reference covering every glob pattern from basic wildcards to advanced features like brace expansion and extended globs. Learn the rules that apply everywhere.
Glob Patterns: The Invisible Abstraction Everyone Uses But Nobody Learns
Glob patterns are everywhere - .gitignore, shell wildcards, build configs - yet most developers learn them by accident through copy-paste. Here’s why glob deserves explicit teaching.
You Don't Know JSON: Part 8 - Lessons from the JSON Revolution
JSON recreated XML’s entire ecosystem modularly. JSX brought back XML’s syntax. What does this teach us about technology evolution? Explore the architectural zeitgeist, pattern survival, and the modularity paradox: choice vs. discoverability.