One post tagged with "compound-engineering"

A few weeks ago, I read Every's compound-engineering guide. The guide gave a name to a practice that I had built without a name. That discovery deflated me a little. The guide states the core idea: "each unit of engineering work should make subsequent units easier—not harder." Most codebases drift the other way. Each feature adds complexity. The more you ship into a codebase, the worse the codebase gets.

I read the line and thought: that idea is the entire point of the harness. The idea is not a feature that I should add. The idea is the constraint that already shapes each file in the harness.

This post is about a concrete, working instance of compound engineering. The post skips the abstract philosophy. The post shows the files that make the idea true. The post also shows the documented failure modes, because I want to be useful, not breathless.