Building Real Things
· Jerwin Arnado · 1 min read ·
Theory closes here. One real feature, start to finish, with the messy parts left in.
The task
- Pick a concrete feature (Laravel feature or a change to this Jekyll site). State the goal in one sentence.
Prompt to plan
- How the task got scoped, what context the agent needed, where CLAUDE.md carried weight.
The loop in action
- The act → observe → adjust cycle on real ground truth (parts 3 and 5 applied).
- Where a subagent helped; where I kept it inline.
What went wrong
- The dead ends, the misread, the place I had to step in. Honest, not a highlight reel.
To deploy
- Review, gates, ship. What I checked before trusting it.
What agentic engineering is and isn’t (yet)
- The closing honest take. Where it multiplies a senior dev, where it still needs the human.