Load human context: make the agent brief you on your terms

Part of The AI Evaluation Handbook

Hosted by Matt Wynne, Aldric, Jeremy, and Zach

Tue, Jul 14, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (45 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Build a Software Factory: Hands-off agentic coding for experienced engineers
Matt Wynne, Aldric Giacomoni, Jeremy Lightsmith, and Zach Marcin
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What you'll learn

Make agentic plans digestible

Get meaningful insight and trust by knowing what the agent *thinks* it's going to do

Stop reviewing PRs and start reviewing outcomes

Feel confident about your agents' output without spending all your time reading PRs.

Fit the tools to you rather than fit yourself to the tools.

Find ways to get the same information you need from the agents, but in whatever format works best for your brain.

Why this topic matters

Using agents means that you write three sentences and get fifteen paragraphs back. It's cognitively exhausting. Learn tools and techniques to close the loop and get on the same page. Let's flip the script: make the agent do the work. Have it brief you in a way that's easy, even fun, to digest... On your terms.

You'll learn from

Matt Wynne

Matt Wynne — Cucumber co-founder, co-author of The Cucumber Book, BDD pioneer.

Matt Wynne has been programming since the mid-1980s and advancing agile practices since discovering the C2 Wiki in 2001. He joined the Cucumber open source project in 2008 and co-authored The Cucumber Book with Cucumber's creator. In 2013 he co-founded Cucumber Ltd, growing it to roughly $1.5M in annual revenue while training thousands in Behaviour-Driven Development, and developed the Example Mapping practice along the way. After SmartBear acquired Cucumber in 2019, he led the open source project until 2023.

Aldric

Aldric Giacomoni — building software through agents since 2023; author of Stone.

Aldric Giacomoni has been building with AI agents since 2023, and for the past 18 months his agentic interface has been his primary way of writing software. He taught the Web Development Immersive at General Assembly and, with Zach Marcin, built a complete training program for Mechanical Orchard's mainframe-modernization product. He is the author of org-gtd (a GTD package for Emacs), Stone (an agentic harness framework), and rakka (BEAM/Erlang primitives on top of Racket) — all built entirely with agents since early 2025.

Jeremy

Jeremy Lightsmith — 25 yrs in tech; helped teams modernize mainframes with LLMs

Jeremy Lightsmith cares about complexity. Across 25 years in tech he has stayed deeply technical while managing structural complexity not just in codebases but across teams and organizations — as a developer, consultant, agile/lean coach, startup founder/CEO, and now executive coach. Most recently he spent three years at Mechanical Orchard anchoring delivery teams and building tools as they used LLMs to modernize mainframes for Fortune 500 clients. Today he helps senior leaders manage new forms of complexity, navigate accelerating change, and rebuild trust as engineering loops are rewritten.

Zach

Zach Marcin — designs and teaches agentic training for quality modernization.

The most effective software practitioners make their whole team better, not just themselves. From pair programming to consulting to teaching I've spent my entire career focused on effective knowledge sharing — growing and helping those around me grow. Lately that's meant learning, using, and teaching how to effectively use AI to modernize mainframes.


Used well, an LLM is a huge multiplier for one engineer. Share that skill across a team and it goes exponential. Build a system that improves along with your team's knowledge, and it goes hyperbolic. That's what I'm excited to share: how to build and improve agentic systems you and your team can rely on for trustworthy, high-quality outcomes.

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