The books

Two books explain the system: Effective Agents teaches you to direct coding agents. Machina Practica explains the skills so you can understand and maintain them.

Effective Agents

The programmer's guide to building reliable software with agents.

Start by building a multiplayer game. Install the skills, describe the game and try what the agent builds. Short prompts describe the result you want; the skills supply the development procedure.

The book teaches you to:

• Establish the product vision and understand the domain.
• Prove the application can build, launch and be tested.
• Design and implement complete user journeys.
• Build with tested components and repeatable checks.
• Investigate failures and accept work against the result you asked for.

Start with the draft table of contents or Chapter 1: Build a game: Deep Sea. Both are drafts for review. The opening exercise has been built and tested locally with the skills, through a complete three-dive game and rematch. Its trial report records the results and their limits.

Machina Practica

A walkthrough of the agent skills, their goals and their design.

For each skill, the book explains what it helps the agent accomplish, why its instructions take their present form, and how to tell whether they work. That understanding lets you improve, update and maintain the skills as the tools and projects change.

The book is for people and agents working on the skills. Its scope is still taking shape; the starting point is to connect each skill's goals to its instructions, worked examples and checks. This book shares its name with the overall system.

Markdown and print editions

Both books will be written in Markdown, so people and agents can read and work with the same source. We plan to use Typst to produce professionally typeset print editions from that source. The print workflow is not built yet.

What's available

Effective Agents has a draft table of contents and first chapter. The remaining chapters and the Machina Practica manuscript are still to be written.

You can also read how the method works and the goals behind it, and inspect the experimental skills.