My Agentic Engineering Workflow

Tools Full comparisons and context in my 2026 AI tech stack post . This is just what you need installed to follow the workflow below. Claude Code If you're new, start with the cheat sheet and Anthropic best practices . Security — set this up first: Claude Code Security Hooks — 7-layer prompt injection defence, read guards, canary files Lock down your .env and any git-secret files in .claude/settings.local.json before anything else MCP: Context7 — library/API docs on demand DeepWiki — open source repo documentation Skills: Matt Pocock's skill set — /grill-me , /handoff , /improve-codebase-architecture (covered in detail below) Understand Anything — interactive code knowledge graphs Ponytail — laziest-senior-dev heuristic, pairs well with /improve-codebase-architecture Agents: DocsExplorer — handles docs lookup in a subagent without polluting main context Hooks / proxies: rtk — token reduction proxy, single Rust binary UI: Claude HUD — status bar showing model, context size, active tools and agents Other tools JetBrains — for git, debugging and reviewing Claude's changes; Claude Code plugin Warp.dev — terminal; Warp Oz for hands-off tasks, Claude Code for hands-on Process As I've mentioned in previous posts, my workflow is typically very different from what you'll see in the hype and social media posts. I don't typically work on monorepo, single stack, single language projects. My clients are typically full-on microservices with multiple languages and stacks. And beyond that, I still prefer IDEs over fancy pluggable text-editors, which often means I can't keep all the projects single scoped. What this means is that current favourites like Air , Conductor , and Antigravity don't work for me. So I've been solving my own problems, and this process I'm sharing today allows me to employ multiple agents working mostly independently on different repos towards a singular goal. I treat my agents like I would juniors or contractors; trust but verify. I give them tasks, but I ha