Agent-First Ways of Working
AI as a colleague and target audience for documentation.
Lesson
Every human has their own way of thinking and absorbing information, AI can help bridge the gap.
The lesson in full: While the outcome of this approach remains to be seen, my direct team and I have fully embraced this way of working and accelerated our work. From starting multiple sessions locally, spinning up cloud agents to validate and refine ideas, to realizing the gap in what we have not written down, this has become an integral part of our workflow. This also flips the scale on certain ‘exploration’ tasks that would have been put on hold otherwise.
What it is
Treating AI as a ‘friend/colleague’ that can maintain a massive context window. This fundamentally changed our documentation approach: instead of omitting details, include all of them for AI to filter; instead of writing conclusions only, include the entire thought process with rationale and trade-offs; instead of writing what code does, focus on why and the value. Adopted AGENTS.md and Agent Skills standards. By late 2026 this is a practice with artifacts, not a stance. In the Surface repository I authored 12+ agent skills that drive various aspects of our specification, development and testing processes. Some examples: a skill to validate assumptions-turned-facts during multi-agent workflows or long-running sessions with multiple context compactions; a set of skills to preserve the ‘thought process’ behind decisions and actions, usually from long meetings and debates, which ensures that the rationale, alternatives, and trade-offs are kept for agents and human collaborators alike; and skills to compensate for gaps and leverage strengths with different harnesses and LLMs, including generation and reasoning with images for GPT models, gap-tracking for high-context models, etc.
Results
- Adopted AGENTS.md and Agent Skills for the full Surface repository.
- Partially adopted into the main Kognitwin Monorepo.
- Authored 12+ agent skills in the monorepo.
Tools and technologies
GitHub Copilot · AGENTS.md · Agent Skills · Coding Agents
Lineage
Built on lessons from Reasoning Engine, Multi-Agent Reasoning Engine, Catbot AI Test Bed.