Writing about how software gets built now that agents do more of the building.https://cherie-q.github.io/https://cherie-q.github.io/engineering-the-next-level/https://cherie-q.github.io/engineering-the-next-level/A desert-to-dessert typo helped my son imagine his own game worlds. Software engineering helped me keep building them: Everything vs. Zombies grew from 8 worlds to 22.Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/01-build-the-process/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/01-build-the-process/I stopped driving each Copilot PR by hand and built a team of agents that drives them for me. It got good the way a product does: watch it run, fix one thing, repeat. Building the process that builds the feature is now the job.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the featurehttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/02-watching-before-trusting/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/02-watching-before-trusting/The squad wasn’t designed and then switched on. It got good through 96 small releases in eleven days, and it earned write access one step at a time.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the featurehttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/03-not-copilots-problem/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/03-not-copilots-problem/The most common way the squad wasted a round was asking Copilot to fix something that wasn’t Copilot’s to fix. Each case became a rule for recognizing it.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the featurehttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/04-catching-scope-creep/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/04-catching-scope-creep/An agent loop repeats a bad early choice every round. The fix was to catch scope as early as possible, and to make steering it a writing task.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the featurehttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/05-making-it-cheaper/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/05-making-it-cheaper/Cost is easy to ignore until a busy day. Three small changes on Oct 7 cut the cost of a run by about a third, and the cost per PR on busy runs roughly in half. A cheaper model didn’t make the cut.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the featurehttps://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/06-lessons/https://cherie-q.github.io/copilot-pr-squad/06-lessons/Most of what I learnt isn’t about pull requests. This is what I’d carry into building another squad, or any agent process that runs without someone watching.Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTBuilding the process, not the feature