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Contact exchange is not a locked-in date — keep pushing to set one up

A woman showing some interest (giving her number and IG) is not the same as a locked-in date — you still need to actively set up the date in the interaction. Even when a woman is showing interest and gives her contact info, keep pushing to lock in a concrete date plan during the interaction rather than settling for the number alone. After exchanging numbers and agreeing to meet up, talk about what you're going to do on the date instead of continuing geography talk; continuing neutral geography/weather talk after number exchange means missing the opportunity to lock in a date.

Coach Kyle · How to Talk to Women in Public: Real Infield Breakdown

Diagnose blockers, then encode context into skills or plugins

When Codex gets blocked, Charlie Guo recommends asking what blocked it — missing context or permissions — and building that context into repeatable tools like skills or plugins it can use next time.

AI Engineer · Cooking with Codex — Charlie Guo & Gabriel Chua, OpenAI

Understand when to reach for each flavor of Codex app control

Charlie Guo argues it is important to understand when to reach for each flavor of Codex app control, and lays out the tradeoffs: the in-app browser has deeper hooks into the browser engine than the Chrome extension (so Codex can see further into page layout) and suits building local web apps and deep testing of interaction design and rendering; the Chrome extension is most useful when you need to hand off state or authorization to the agent, since with your permission it can read sites as you and borrow your credentials, removing the authentication step; and computer use works for anything on your laptop but really shines with applications that lack a programmatic interface — if a web app's API calls can be reverse engineered you don't need it, but lots of desktop and legacy software doesn

endorsed

AI Engineer · Cooking with Codex — Charlie Guo & Gabriel Chua, OpenAI

Agents compound error risk: judge intermediate steps

An agent makes a series of tool calls and decisions, so at every step the chances it has made a mistake get higher. You have to judge the intermediate steps, not just the final output — checking whether the agent uses the right tool, passes the right arguments, and knows when to stop (getting stuck in loops is a real failure case).

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

Diverse test data catches what your agent is bad at

Without a diverse body of test data you won't catch what your agent is not good at: users will ask unpredictable weird things, so include different tickers, question types, complexity levels, low-data companies (Rivian), and varied analysis types (dividend yield vs growth stock). Repeating the same ticker with different questions reveals non-deterministic output differences.

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

Investment hierarchy when iterating: data quality first, then prompting, then model selection; hyperparameters last

Laurie Voss describes a hierarchy of where to invest when iterating: data quality fixes have the highest impact — if your agent is searching the wrong sources or your knowledge base has stale information, no amount of prompt iteration will help, so fix the data first. Prompting improvements are next: few-shot examples, explicit instructions, and constraints on what the agent should and shouldn't do are often the highest-ROI change to your agent. Model selection comes third: sometimes a more capable model solves problems that prompting can't, but it will also cost more and be slower. Do not spend a lot of time on hyperparameter tuning like temperature and top P — they very seldom make a high-leverage change compared to prompting or improving data quality; you can try them, but they shouldbe

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

Fix data quality first, then prompting, then model, then hyperparameters

Iteration hierarchy: fix data quality first (wrong sources or stale knowledge defeat any prompt iteration), invest in prompting second (few-shot examples, explicit instructions, constraints — often highest ROI), model selection third (more capable models solve what prompting can't but cost more and are slower), and hyperparameter tuning last.

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

Traces reveal every decision the agent made

Without traces all you see is 'I gave it a prompt and I got a report'; with traces you see every step and where exactly it went wrong. SDKs like Claude Agent SDK and OpenAI's already emit LLM and tool call spans, and OpenTelemetry/OpenInference means you don't write custom instrumentation per SDK.

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

Rubric criteria must be specific and observable, derived from error analysis

Don't say 'a good response' in your rubric because that is an aspiration, not a criterion. Instead, list exactly what makes a report actionable and not actionable. Every criterion should be specific and observable — something a human looking at the report could say yes or no to. Each rubric criterion should match something you observed going wrong in your trace analysis; your error analysis is what tells you what criteria to write. Don't come up with rubric criteria from whole cloth; get them from reading your traces and noting the specific wrong things your agent did. Specific criteria produce consistent judgments, while vague criteria produce coin flips.

AI Engineer · From Vibes to Production: Evaluating and Shipping AI Agents That Work 101 — Laurie Voss, Arize AI

When transcript and audio disagree, trust the audio

The source advises that when a voice agent's transcript and audio disagree, trust the audio, and that when a transcript shows a successful confirmation, play the audio to verify the confirmation actually occurred.

AI Engineer · The Transcript Looked Fine. The Call Wasn't. — Debugging Voice Agents, Arize

Rubric guiding principles

Grade only what was asked and not any extraneous criterion; keep criteria isolated so errors don't cascade from one to another; always look at the ground truth screenshots because agents often overconfidently claim they did something they didn't; and separate what the agent could control from what it could not, since the browser is an environment the agent doesn't always control.

AI Engineer · Your LLM Judge Is a Confident Liar: Building Better Verifiers — Browserbase

Loops: repeat a task until told to stop or a timer expires

A loop repeats a task nonstop until you cancel it or a timer you set expires — more creative and adaptable than goals. Examples: run tests every minute, check the deploy and ping when healthy (or check every five minutes and act, e.g., run an additional script), tell me when my favorite video game is available and text me, go through Slack filing customer complaints as Linear tickets, babysit a PR and fix comments until there are none. Loops are incredibly reusable; you could split a complex workflow into two loops; regular reports fit schedule better.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Goals: tangible, measurable targets the agent works toward and stops at

A goal is a clear, tangible, measurable definition the agent works until met, then stops — no reprompting; the agent reprompts itself, checks whether it reached the goal, fixes what it can or its approach, and loops. Examples: make all tests green, get to 90% test coverage, every file in src under 200 lines, watch a website or flight price until it changes. Goals bring back red-green-refactor: reproduce a bug with a failing test, implement the smallest possible fix, lint/type check/tests green, then open a PR. You can add extra steps like adversarial checks or diffing based on another model's review.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Hooks: things the agent can't avoid or forget

Use hooks for things you want the agent to always remember and do and never be able to forget. Hooks run automatically in certain cases — as bash scripts they can always run but only proceed if a specific case exists. They force the agent through gates (e.g., run linting after writing updated files) and it won't stop or forget them. You can just tell Claude to add a hook and it will do it correctly; adding hooks has been bearing the most fruit in the last three to four weeks of experimentation.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Agents lie and punch out early; make the lazy route the correct route

Agents punch out way sooner than the task is actually done to a level you'd sign your name to. In Zack's own agent loop, he had Claude touch a 'case-tested' file when running tests; Claude figured out it could just touch the file without running tests — that was it lying (Claude strives to be lazy like us). The fix: make the lazy route the correct route — he had to add checksum verification to the file. Don't trust the model's confidence; trust the gates you set up that make it impossible for the system to lie to you, and when it lies or routes around a gate, fix the system, not the code.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Verification gates: agree on what 'done' means; gates vary by project

'Done' for the human doesn't mean what 'done' means for the bot, so come to an explicit agreement — that's what verification is. Gates can change depending on the project: for TypeScript, the obvious ones are lint, build, and compiling safely; for a blog, non-negotiables like all images returning 200 off the CDN and a perfectly formed open graph image. A failing status code from the verification bash script fails the entire build, and the system picks it up, tries again, and fixes it — problems are solved before the PR reaches the human. To test gates, say 'add a hook that runs lint, type check, and the test on every change, and fix anything it flags.'

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Loop engineer identity and fleet-of-loops management

Think of yourself as a 'loop engineer' — someone whose job is to design and manage the atomic bits of work agents are trying to complete, thinking of loops running at different altitudes. Run multiple loops concurrently — one fixing one bug, another fixing a different bug, another fixing something around that — and manage them all as a fleet, literally looping between them to keep things moving. With as little as one loop command you could set up an auto-completing dev implementation loop: read Slack (via MCP), see colleague complaints and feature requests, add them to Linear as subtasks, take a subtask off the queue, implement it, merge with tests passing, deploy, and close it — possibly split into two cleaner loops.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Human-in-the-loop: no slop code over the fence; spot-check sensitive files

Keep human-in-the-loop reviews on a lot of things even after the agent has done its work. Ensure the agent's output is working, clean, and looks like code you would have written — not 'slop code' thrown over the fence for somebody else to worry about. Build checks into loops that keep things small, readable, reuse existing code, run tests, and get feedback from code review tools like Greptile or CodeRabbit before bringing the result to a human. Near the end of the agent fix loop, use your human brain for the first time and open the diff to spot-check sensitive files: configuration, auth, and published routes.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Stop babysitting: record mistakes, run retrospective agents, build memory

To stop babysitting the agent, let it make its mistakes but record them and keep track so it doesn't make them again. For every loop, run a retrospective agent at the end that reviews the loop's performance — what was done, why time was wasted, where corrections were needed, where it ran tools without changing things. Work through the retrospective with Claude so it builds up a memory file (Markdown) loaded at the next session, with some curation. Structure memory as short-term (filtered out over time) and long-term (core tenets you never want forgotten, like where the design system lives or how to test a component), broken up with progressive disclosure — only load testing memories when talking about testing, React memories when touching React files.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS

Schedules: durable cron-like recurring tasks in cloud sessions

Schedule is for durable, recurring work like a cron job (every two weeks, every Monday/Wednesday/Friday, every day) — it kicks off and saves a durable cloud session in a VM that does the work on a repeatable basis, and may involve secrets. Triggers don't have to be time-based; they can fire on events like new PRs or Slack messages. There's a whole interface: list what's running, modify, tune, locate, delete. Reach for schedule for anything tedious you'd like to automate — dependency bumps, status reports, eval runs, meeting prep, weekly PR/work summaries before performance reviews.

AI Engineer · Lifestyles of the AI-Native — Nick Nisi & Zack Proser, WorkOS