Sources and further reading

The references below identify the sources used in the chapters. Links beside particular claims remain the best starting point. Repository links preserve the inspected revisions where available. Living pages were accessed on 2 October 2026. Practitioner accounts, research studies, specifications, and project records serve different purposes; their limits are discussed where they are used. No practitioner is claimed to endorse this entire approach. Interview sources refer to inspected published text or transcript sections; no complete source videos or commercial books are represented as having been consumed for this research.

Reference 1

Pamela Zave and Michael Jackson, “Four Dark Corners of Requirements Engineering,” ACM TOSEM 6(1) (1997), pp.1–30, DOI 10.1145/237432.237434, university-hosted paper

Open source. Used in chapter 1.

Reference 2

Puma, Coding-Standards. Discovery and Design at the inspected revision.

Open source. Used in chapter 2.

Reference 3

Bashar Nuseibeh and Steve Easterbrook, “Requirements Engineering: A Roadmap” (2000), author-hosted PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 2.

Reference 4

Jonathan Sillito, Gail C. Murphy, Kris De Volder, “Questions Programmers Ask During Software Evolution Tasks,” FSE-14 (2006), pp.23–34, DOI 10.1145/1181775.1181779, author-hosted PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 3.

Reference 5

Oxide and Friends. Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age. Published transcript, 15 January 2026; cited passage featuring Bryan Cantrill.

Open source. Used in chapter 3.

Reference 6

Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill, “What do Prototypes Prototype?” in Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd ed. (1997), pp.367–381; author-format university-hosted PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 4.

Reference 7

Mitchell Hashimoto, 11 October 2025. Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature

Open source. Used in chapter 4.

Reference 8

Rick Kazman, Mark Klein, Paul Clements, “ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation,” CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004 (2000), official PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 5.

Reference 9

Rahul Mohanani, Burak Turhan, Paul Ralph, “Requirements Framing Affects Design Creativity,” IEEE TSE 47(5) (2021), pp.936–947; author manuscript 2019; DOI 10.1109/TSE.2019.2909033, arXiv record and PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 5.

Reference 10

Michael Nygard, “Documenting Architecture Decisions,” 15 November 2011, original post

Open source. Used in chapter 5.

Reference 11

Eric Evans, “Domain-Driven Design Reference: Definitions and Pattern Summaries,” March 2015, author's PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 6.

Reference 12

Puma, Pumas-Library. Repair.

Open source. Used in chapter 7.

Reference 13

Puma, Pumas-Library. regression at the inspected head.

Open source. Used in chapter 7.

Reference 14

Puma, Coding-Standards. Simplicity as reduced entanglement; domain ownership and criteria for abstraction/deletion.

Open source. Used in chapter 8.

Reference 15

David L. Parnas, “On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” CACM 15(12) (1972), pp.1053–1058, DOI 10.1145/361598.361623, university-hosted HTML

Open source. Used in chapter 8.

Reference 16

Andreas Kling, 23 February 2026. Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

Open source. Used in chapter 9.

Reference 17

Andreas Kling, 5 June 2026. Changing How We Develop Ladybird

Open source. Used in chapter 9.

Reference 18

Miryung Kim, Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, “An Empirical Study of Refactoring Challenges and Benefits at Microsoft,” IEEE TSE 40(7) (2014), pp.633–649, DOI 10.1109/TSE.2014.2318734, author manuscript

Open source. Used in chapter 10.

Reference 19

Massimiliano Di Penta, Gabriele Bavota, Fiorella Zampetti, “On the Relationship between Refactoring Actions and Bugs: A Differentiated Replication” (2020), author HTML manuscript

Open source. Used in chapter 10.

Reference 20

Martin Fowler, “Yagni,” 26 May 2015, author's essay

Open source. Used in chapter 10.

Reference 21

Martin Fowler, “Design Stamina Hypothesis,” 20 June 2007, author's essay

Open source. Used in chapter 10.

Reference 22

Mitchell Hashimoto, 1 June 2023. My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects

Open source. Used in chapter 11.

Reference 23

John Yang et al. SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering. arXiv:2405.15793v3, 11 November 2024. Paper

Open source. Used in chapter 12.

Reference 24

Armin Ronacher, 12 June 2025. Agentic Coding Recommendations

Open source. Used in chapter 12.

Reference 25

Puma, Coding-Standards. Registration does not rewrite prose or certify coverage; same-candidate ordering and tombstones.

Open source. Used in chapter 13.

Reference 26

Puma, Coding-Standards. Cold/full versus incremental replay, failed suffix isolation, caller mutation resistance.

Open source. Used in chapter 13.

Reference 27

Puma, Coding-Standards. Registration plan.

Open source. Used in chapter 13.

Reference 28

Puma, Coding-Standards. Immutable projection table; staged registration before final compile.

Open source. Used in chapter 13.

Reference 29

Puma, Coding-Standards. Registered policy scopes.

Open source. Used in chapter 14.

Reference 30

Puma, Coding-Standards. Scoped discovery consumer declarations; presence is not an exhaustive actual-consumer audit.

Open source. Used in chapter 14.

Reference 31

Thibaud Gloaguen et al. Evaluating AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents? arXiv:2602.11988v3, 29 September 2026. Paper

Open source. Used in chapter 14.

Reference 32

Edoardo Debenedetti et al. Defeating Prompt Injections by Design. arXiv:2503.18813v2, 24 June 2025. Paper; official code

Open source. Used in chapter 15.

Reference 33

Luc Moreau and Paolo Missier, editors. PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model. W3C Recommendation, 30 April 2013. Versioned recommendation

Open source. Used in chapter 16.

Reference 34

Yanda Chen et al. Reasoning Models Don’t Always Say What They Think. arXiv:2505.05410v1, 8 May 2025. Paper record; author-hosted paper

Open source. Used in chapter 16.

Reference 35

Puma, Coding-Standards. Planning, pinned revision.

Open source. Used in chapter 17.

Reference 36

Puma, Coding-Standards. Purposeful development/integration boundaries; no branch/merge-per-slice rule.

Open source. Used in chapter 18.

Reference 37

Mitchell Hashimoto, 5 February 2026. My AI Adoption Journey

Open source. Used in chapter 18.

Reference 38

Puma, Passeur. Task admission.

Open source. Used in chapter 19.

Reference 39

Puma, Passeur. lifecycle tests.

Open source. Used in chapter 19.

Reference 40

Puma, Passeur. Repair record.

Open source. Used in chapter 20.

Reference 41

Puma, Passeur. competing reclaimers.

Open source. Used in chapter 20.

Reference 42

Puma, Passeur. paused owner.

Open source. Used in chapter 20.

Reference 43

Yubin Kim et al. Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems. arXiv:2512.08296v3, 8 April 2026. Paper

Open source. Used in chapter 20.

Reference 44

Chunqiu Steven Xia, Yinlin Deng, Soren Dunn, Lingming Zhang. Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents. arXiv:2407.01489v2, 29 October 2024. Paper

Open source. Used in chapter 21.

Reference 45

Puma, Passeur. Operational report.

Open source. Used in chapter 22.

Reference 46

Puma, Passeur. adapter repair.

Open source. Used in chapter 22.

Reference 47

Steve Yegge, 15 September 2026. Seats and Sunsets

Open source. Used in chapter 22.

Reference 48

Puma, Pumas-Library. Public-boundary test.

Open source. Used in chapter 23.

Reference 49

Puma, Pumas-Library. recorded execution and limits.

Open source. Used in chapter 23.

Reference 50

Simon Willison. Agentic Manual Testing. Agentic Engineering Patterns, living guide, accessed 2 October 2026.

Open source. Used in chapter 23.

Reference 51

Simon Willison. Anti-patterns Things to Avoid. Agentic Engineering Patterns, living guide, accessed 2 October 2026.

Open source. Used in chapter 24.

Reference 52

Salvatore Sanfilippo, 13 July 2026. Control the ideas, not the code

Open source. Used in chapter 24.

Reference 53

Daniel Stenberg, 10 June 2026. A human in control

Open source. Used in chapter 24.

Reference 54

Puma, Passeur. Transport observation.

Open source. Used in chapter 25.

Reference 55

Puma, Passeur. descendant fixture.

Open source. Used in chapter 25.

Reference 56

Puma, Pumas-Library. Crash-boundary regression.

Open source. Used in chapter 25.

Reference 57

Armin Ronacher, 7 September 2026. Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

Open source. Used in chapter 25.

Reference 58

Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Elizabeth Barnes, David Rein. Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. arXiv:2507.09089v2, 25 July 2025. Paper record; researcher report

Open source. Used in chapter 26.

Reference 59

Joel Becker et al., METR. We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design. 24 February 2026. Researcher update

Open source. Used in chapter 26.

Reference 60

Daniel Stenberg, 22 April 2026. High-Quality Chaos

Open source. Used in chapter 26.

Reference 61

Puma, Coding-Standards. Exact-head run completed failure; 613 Engine tests, one failure INVALID_SEMANTIC_REVISION. Complete verification not reached.

Open source. Used in chapter 27.

Reference 62

Puma, Coding-Standards. Fail-fast sequential verification; complete verifier after Engine suite.

Open source. Used in chapter 27.

Reference 63

Puma, Coding-Standards. Proposal projection test hard-codes accepted revision 1/proposed 2.

Open source. Used in chapter 27.

Reference 64

Puma, Coding-Standards. Written-plan-applicability revision is 2.

Open source. Used in chapter 27.

Reference 65

Drew DeVault/SourceHut, 27 August 2026. Changes to SourceHut's terms of service regarding LLMs

Open source. Used in chapter 29.

Reference 66

Siru Ouyang et al. RepoGraph: Enhancing AI Software Engineering with Repository-level Code Graph. arXiv:2410.14684v2, 18 March 2025; ICLR 2025. Paper

Open source. Used in chapter 30.

Reference 67

Puma, Coding-Standards. Recovery plan.

Open source. Used in chapter 31.

Reference 68

Puma, Coding-Standards. pilot report.

Open source. Used in chapter 31.

Reference 69

Barry Boehm, edited by Wilfred J. Hansen, “Spiral Development: Experience, Principles, and Refinements,” CMU/SEI-2000-SR-008 (2000), official PDF

Open source. Used in chapter 31.