Who Is This For and How to Use This Handbook
The intended audience for the handbook, how to navigate it, and where to find related resources
Primary Audience
This handbook is written primarily for practitioners — the people who build, ship, and maintain software every day. While the principles of agentic development have broad applicability across knowledge work, this handbook focuses specifically on software engineering teams operating within Agile environments.
The core audience is anyone in a software engineering discipline working within an Agile team:
- Software Engineers (frontend, backend, full-stack) — The practitioners who will work most directly with AI agents in their daily workflow
- QA and Test Engineers — Professionals rethinking test strategies when agents can generate and execute tests autonomously
- DevOps and Platform Engineers — Teams building the infrastructure and tooling that enables agentic workflows
- Technical Leads and Staff Engineers — Senior practitioners defining the patterns, guardrails, and standards for human-agent collaboration
Secondary Audience
Several roles outside the direct engineering team will also find this handbook valuable:
- Engineering Managers — Leaders responsible for team productivity, skill development, and adoption strategy
- Product Managers — Stakeholders who need to understand how agentic workflows change estimation, scoping, and delivery timelines
- CTOs and VP Engineering — Executives making strategic decisions about tooling, governance, and organizational readiness
Beyond Software Engineering
The principles in this handbook — context clarity, specification-driven work, human-agent collaboration — apply broadly to all knowledge work: technical writing, data analysis, design, research, and more. However, this handbook focuses on software engineering to provide concrete, actionable guidance rather than abstract generalizations.
Handbook Structure
This handbook is organized into chapters that build on each other, but each chapter can also be read independently:
- Introduction (you are here) — What agentic development is and why it matters
- Getting Started — Setting up your environment and running your first agentic workflow
- Foundations — Agentic AI building blocks and multi-agent systems
- The Agentic Development Framework — The orchestration layer, core pillars, and the evolution from Agile to Agentic
- Team Model — The Hybrid Squad structure, role definitions, and talent development
- Operational Infrastructure — The Agent Workbench, context management, and evaluation harness
- Operations — Governance routines, ceremonies, metrics, and an end-to-end case study
How to Read
Sequential Reading
Start from the beginning and work through each chapter in order. This is recommended if you are new to agentic development and want a comprehensive understanding.
Reference Reading
Jump to specific topics using the sidebar navigation. Each page is self-contained enough to be useful on its own, with cross-links to related content when deeper context is needed.
Cross-References
Throughout the handbook, you will find links to other resources on this site:
- Patterns — Proven approaches to common agentic development challenges
- Templates — Ready-to-use templates for agentic workflows
- Playbooks — Step-by-step guides for specific scenarios
- Glossary — Definitions of key terms used throughout the site
These cross-references connect the handbook's conceptual content with practical, actionable resources.
Contributing
This handbook is open source and welcomes contributions. If you would like to improve existing content, add new chapters, or fix errors, check the contribution guidelines in the handbook repository.