AI Agent · Field Notes

Building with Intelligent Agents

Field notes from Xinwei Xiong (cubxxw) on taking large models out of the chat box and into production systems. The work spans three directions — agent engineering, context engineering, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — all drawn from real builds, real failures, and real retrospectives.

61 articles Ongoing RSS
01 AGENT ENGINEERING

Agent Engineering

Harness design, tool orchestration, multi-agent systems — where the 98% of engineering beyond the model actually lives.

Agent Engineering column
02 CONTEXT ENGINEERING

Context Engineering

Context, memory, RAG and retrieval — what bounds an agent's intelligence isn't the model, it's what the model can see.

Start with this one
03 GEO

Generative Engine Optimization

When search shifts from giving links to giving answers, visibility is decided by the probability of being cited by AI.

GEO series

All Articles

61
  1. 01
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    When Anyone Can Build the Thing, "He Built It" Becomes the Signal

    The Super Individual's Gear Stack · 5/5AISuper IndividualOpen Source
  9. 09

    Distribution for Solo Builders: Your Readers Can't Be Copied

    The Super Individual's Gear Stack · 4/5AISuper IndividualContent Strategy
  10. 10

    AI Writes Requirements for Free, and That's the Most Dangerous Part

    The Super Individual's Gear Stack · 3/5AIAgentSuper Individual
  11. 11

    I Ran Ten Agents Overnight, Woke Up to Ten PRs, and Then I Got Stuck

    The Super Individual's Gear Stack · 2/5AIAgentSuper Individual
  12. 12

    The Four-Layer AI Stack for Super Individuals: What Actually Compounds

    The Super Individual's Gear Stack · 1/5AIAgentSuper Individual
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    Where AI Agents Still Have a Blue Ocean

    AI 2026: First-Half Review, Second-Half Forecast · 5/5AILLMAgent
  18. 18

    How to Build Real Trust in Unattended AI Agents That Act

    AI 2026: First-Half Review, Second-Half Forecast · 4/5AILLMAgent
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    Agent Fleet Economics in 2026: Testing Low-Cost APIs and Open-Weight Options

    AI 2026: First-Half Review, Second-Half Forecast · 3/5AILLMAgent
  21. 21

    When the AI Agent Starts Prompting You, What Has Actually Changed

    AI 2026: First-Half Review, Second-Half Forecast · 2/5AILLMAgent
  22. 22

    AI News Pipelines: Automation Limits and Human Judgment

    AI 2026: First-Half Review, Second-Half Forecast · 1/5AILLMAgent
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    AI Content Creation Workflow: Turning Knowledge Into Work People Want

    From Information to Creation · 5/5Product StrategyPersonal GrowthAI
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    AI Note-Taking Workflow: Turn Fleeting Inputs Into Verifiable Records

    From Information to Creation · 3/5Personal GrowthSelf-DiscoveryAI
  30. 30

    AI Information Filtering Workflow: Capture Signal Without a Noise Archive

    From Information to Creation · 2/5AILLMPersonal Growth

FAQ

What is Agent Engineering?

Agent Engineering is the discipline of building production-grade AI agent systems. Model capability is only a small fraction of the work — most of the engineering lives in the harness (execution framework), tool orchestration, context management, memory systems, and evaluation. The "Agent Engineering Panorama" article in this section maps these layers systematically.

How is Context Engineering different from prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering optimizes the wording of a single instruction; context engineering manages everything the model can see across an entire session — retrieval results, memory, tool outputs, history compression. As long-running agents become the norm, context engineering is replacing prompt engineering as the new foundation of AI applications.

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

GEO is the practice of making content easier for AI search engines like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity to retrieve and cite. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for click-through ranking, GEO optimizes for the probability of being cited by AI. This section carries a six-part series covering GEO from principles and structured-content tactics to measurement tooling.

What experience is this section based on?

Everything comes from the author's (Xinwei Xiong / cubxxw) first-hand practice building AI products — open-source projects, production agent deployments, and measured data from this blog's own GEO rebuild — not second-hand summaries. Articles are organized into series; start from part one of any series.