Agent-First Engineering¶
Stop coding with AI agents "loosey-goosey." Design your codebase so agents succeed — the way a systems engineer would.
Stop coding with AI agents loosely. Design the repository and its surrounding harness so that
any competent agent succeeds by construction — then the human's job shifts from reviewing every
diff to engineering the environment the agent operates in. The bet isn't on a vendor; it's on the
open standards the major coding agents converged on in 2026 (AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, MCP) and
on two load-bearing disciplines: context engineering and verification. That makes agent-first
setup a portable, teachable discipline rather than a vendor lock-in bet.
This project is two views of one body of knowledge:
- The Curriculum — a phased, visual course that takes you from informal "vibe coding" to designing agent-first codebases: one concept at a time, diagrams, ELI5, a real artifact at the end of every lesson.
- The Scaffolder — an agent-agnostic,
SKILL.md-first tool that interviews you about a project, then generates a proper agent-first setup (AGENTS.md, aSKILL.mdlibrary, and lifecycle-hook guardrails) wired to work across Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
Teach and generate in lockstep: every layer the curriculum teaches, the scaffolder generates; every artifact the scaffolder generates, the curriculum explains.
Start here¶
- 🎓 The Curriculum → — the full 6-phase course, from vibe coding to systems engineer for agents. Start with Phase 1 — Fundamentals.
- 🚀 Roadmap → — the Advanced Patterns tier coming next (skills/hooks deep-dives, security, token optimization, cloud/voice/mobile agents, and more).
- 🗺️ Translation Matrix → — deep Claude→Codex→Cursor feature research, by layer.
What we build on¶
All permissive, all current open standards:
| Layer | Adopted standard / tool |
|---|---|
| Context file | AGENTS.md |
| Reusable skills | Agent Skills / SKILL.md |
| Spec workflow | GitHub Spec Kit (complement, not fork) |
| Principles | 12-factor-agents |
The two load-bearing competencies — context engineering (treat the window as the scarce resource) and verification (give the agent an external oracle so it closes its own loop) — carry the most weight across every researched source. Everything else is scaffolding around those two.