Coding agents for knowledge work

Since the beginning of the year, I have been gradually integrating Cursor, Cline and Codex in my day-to-day tasks. I have diverse knowledge workflows where coding agents have become central to their delivery; coding and the SDLC in general are part of them.

While trying to find patterns in your workflows that can be automated, it might help to keep two things in mind:

a) it’s highly unlikely that you can use the prompts/skills of someone else as is; yes, you should study them and get ideas, but you should fully own your prompts in the end, create them from scratch (don’t use agents), gradually improve them with trial and error, and tailor them to your business.

b) don’t underestimate the power of deterministic scripts that can automate part of the workflow and can be used as agentic tools; they’re easy to build once you know what you’re doing, they’re fast, predictable and token free.

Point a) is why I rarely provide artifacts for you to copy in my articles. I usually describe my working principles. Point b) is why my workflows look like pipelines with agentic and deterministic steps intertwined.