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Series 6 posts • ~37 min total

Agentic Workflows in Practice

Real work, documented as it happens. Not demos, not theory—actual tasks where AI agents execute, iterate, and deliver. A running log of what works, what breaks, and what it means for how we work.

I’ve been using AI agents for real work—not experiments, not demos—for over a year now. The gap between what gets posted on X and what actually happens in practice is vast.

This series closes that gap.

Each entry documents an actual workflow: the task, the collaboration, the friction, the outcome. Some are mundane (video compression). Some are complex (multi-agent code refactors). All are real.

The Pattern:

  1. Practical posts — What happened, step by step. The task, the tools, the decisions, the results.
  2. Strategic posts — What it means. The shifts in capability, the implications for work, the questions that emerge.

I’m not proving AI works. I already know it does—for me, in my context, with my constraints. I’m documenting how it works so I can teach it, refine it, and see what patterns emerge over time.

The Arc (ongoing):

  1. 22GB to 2GB — Video compression as agentic collaboration
  2. The Cowork Moment — Why Anthropic productizing this pattern matters
  3. The Signal Forge Method — Agentic document generation with voice calibration
  4. When the Voice Guide Becomes the Problem — Teaching AI principles, not phrases
  5. From Research Paper to Working Toolkit — Turning a 46-citation framework into working code
  6. Spec-Driven Development with Multi-Agent Orchestration — Specialists implement, verifiers catch drift

This isn’t a polished retrospective. It’s a running log. Some entries will be rough. That’s the point.

Reading Order

1

22GB to 2GB: Video Compression as Agentic Collaboration

I needed to send 90 video files to a remote editor over mobile hotspot. The files were too large. What followed wasn't a tutorial lookup—it was a collaboration with an AI agent that analyzed, proposed, tested, pivoted, and executed. This is what agentic workflows actually look like.

5 min •
2

The Cowork Moment: When Agentic AI Goes Mainstream

Anthropic just shipped Claude Cowork—'Claude Code for the rest of your work.' It's the same agentic pattern I've been using for months, now packaged for non-developers. This isn't a product launch. It's a category shift in what AI assistance means.

5 min •
3

The Signal Forge Method: Agentic Document Generation

I kept getting the same document wrong. Blog voice in architecture docs. Technical precision in executive briefs. Then I realized the problem wasn't AI—it was me. I was treating all documents as the same task.

8 min •
4

When the Voice Guide Becomes the Problem

I wrote a voice guide to help AI match my writing style. It worked too well—the AI learned the example phrases, not the principles behind them. Here's how I fixed it, and what it taught me about the difference between describing a voice and understanding one.

5 min •
5

From Research Paper to Working Toolkit in One Session

I had a 46-citation research paper about autonomous documentation. Academic frameworks rarely survive contact with a real codebase. So I asked an agent to turn theory into working code—and watched what happened.

7 min •
6

Spec-Driven Development with Multi-Agent Orchestration

The problem with AI coding assistants isn't capability—it's coordination. A single agent can write code. But who checks the work? Who remembers what was decided? I built a system where specialists implement and verifiers catch drift.

7 min •
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