What this is
Every Tuesday, one email to help you work the way the engineers furthest ahead with agents already work. It covers two things:
How they work. Their setups, habits and opinions, first-hand and specific enough for you to copy.
What changed this week, and what it lets you do differently.
12–18 links. Two sentences each, saying what it is and what it changes for you. Five minutes and you’re caught up.
No thinkpieces, no funding rounds, no “AI will change everything.” If a link doesn’t change how you work, or tell you something you’d otherwise have been caught out by, it doesn’t run.
Who the 100x engineers are
A few engineers get far more out of agents than everyone else, and they show how: in posts, tweets, talks and repos. I call them 100x engineers. They earn the name by what they ship and share. Follower count and job title don’t come into it.
Each one runs because there is something in it you could try yourself. A famous name with nothing in it to copy doesn’t run. And “100x” is only ever about people here. A tool that promises to make you 100x is marketing.
How things get chosen
Every item is scored against a written standard. Most are cut.
An item has to clear all five bars:
Concrete. Names a specific artifact, technique, finding, measurement, or a habit someone actually uses. “Agents are getting better at long tasks” fails. “I ask the model to explain its diff before I review it” passes.
New. Published or materially changed this week.
Consequential. You do something differently after reading it, or you now know something that would have caught you out.
Primary. The original. An engineer’s own post, tweet or talk counts. Coverage of it doesn’t.
Non-obvious. Tells a competent engineer something they don’t already know. This is the bar most things fail.
When it’s close, I ask whether you’d be annoyed you clicked. That cuts a lot. Some weeks it leaves me with nine links instead of sixteen, and I send nine.
A pipeline does the reading and the first pass of scoring. It gets through far more than I could on my own, but it doesn’t get the final say on anything. I go through every item myself, write the note at the top, and press publish.
The categories
In the order they appear in the email:
Work Like a 100x Engineer. A habit or setup from someone far ahead, specific enough for you to try. Always first.
From the Labs. A frontier lab shipped something.
Harness & Tooling. The machinery you run agents in.
Evals & Reliability. Knowing whether the thing works.
Agent Security. Injection, sandboxing, permissions.
Try It This Week. Something you can pick up today.
Not every category runs every week. Most weeks two or three of them are empty, and I’d rather leave them out than find something to fill them with.
Who I am
Lorenz. I build agentic experiences at Cresta, an AI company in San Francisco, so this is my day job as well as my reading list. Austrian, currently in Dubai. Over 1,000 engineers read this.
The archive
Past editions are in the archive.