Harlley Oliveira
Agentic Product Engineer
Building tools that let agents drive the work — TODO.md as the task board, worktrees for isolation, squash-merges as the human checkpoint.
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What an agentic product engineer actually does all day
Less typing. More wiring up agents that can. A field note from the messy middle.
I used to ship features by typing them. Now I ship features by typing the spec, watching an agent type the feature, reading the diff, and pressing approve.
That sounds glib. It isn't.
The shape of the day shifted
A year ago, my unit of work was a function. I'd open a file, hold a small mental model of "what calls this," and edit. The output was a commit.
Today the unit of work is a task that an agent can run. The hard part isn't the implementation - the agent can do that. The hard part is writing a task the agent can actually execute without me babysitting it. Names. Shapes. The weird invariant that lives in the head of a senior engineer and nowhere in the code. If I leave any of that out, the agent fills it in by guessing, and the guess is plausible, fluent, and wrong.
So my morning looks like this:
- Open a TODO.md.
- Write a task that - if a stranger picked it up cold - they could finish.
- Dispatch an agent to a fresh git worktree.
- Move on to the next task. Come back when it's
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