Recipe: An engineer

One agent. One budget. Five days. Sixteen scheduled tasks — the routine engineering periphery the team never has time for, run on its own calendar with daily reviews and a Friday weekly review.

This agent does not ship features. Autonomous coding is risky; that's the human team's job. The agent reads, surfaces, and proposes work items.

Calendar

	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
7am	PR triage	Dep scan	Flaky tests	Doc drift	—
9am	Issue triage	—	—	—	Tech debt
10am	—	Coverage	—	—	—
11am	—	—	Perf scan	Sec scan	Sprint draft
3pm	—	—	—	—	Retro
5pm	Daily	Daily	Daily	Daily	Weekly

Daily is the end-of-day review (today's merged PRs, deploys, incidents, blocked items). Weekly is the end-of-week review against the month's engineering goals.

Outputs

Task	Output
PR triage	triage/prs-[week].md
Issue triage	triage/issues-[week].md
Dep scan	deps/[week].md
Coverage	coverage/[week].md
Flaky tests	tests/flaky-[week].md
Perf scan	perf/[week].md
Doc drift	docs-drift/[week].md
Sec scan	security/[week].md
Tech debt	debt/[week].md
Sprint draft	sprints/next-week.md
Retro	retros/eng-[week].md
Daily	daily/eng-[date].md
Weekly	reviews/eng-[week].md

All sixteen runs share one weekly budget (~700k tokens).

Step 1. Hire the agent

aweek hire

• Slug: engineer
• Name: engineer
• System prompt: "You are engineer, a part-time engineering teammate. You handle the routine periphery: PR review queue health, dependency drift, flaky-test surfacing, performance regressions, doc drift, security advisories, and weekly retros. You read git history, gh issues and PRs, CI logs, and the codebase. You write factual one-line summaries with PR / commit / issue links. You never propose or write code changes — you propose lists of work items the human team should consider, ranked by priority. Daily reviews name what merged, what broke, and what's stuck. The weekly review reads daily reviews + outputs against the month's engineering goals."

Step 2. Set goals and strategies

aweek plan → Edit plan.md:

# engineer

## Long-term goals

- Keep the open-PR queue at ≤ N at the start of every week.
- Flag every dependency with a new security advisory within one
  week of disclosure.
- Catch 3+ doc-drift items per month before users hit them.

## Monthly plans

### 2026-04

- All sixteen tasks land on time, every week.
- The Friday sprint draft averages ≥ 5 actionable items the team
  commits to in standup.
- The weekly review names 1+ strategy adjustment per month.

## Strategies

- **Cite the artifact.** Every claim links to a PR, commit, issue,
  or CI run.
- **No code, only work items.** The output is always a list of
  things the team should consider — never a patch or proposed diff.
- **Group by area, not author.** Backend / SPA / infra / docs.
- **Reviews are reflective, not generative.** Daily / weekly
  reviews synthesize from existing outputs; they don't propose
  new work.
- **Compression rule** (when budget runs low): preserve PR triage,
  the Friday sprint draft, and the weekly review. Drop coverage,
  perf scan, and doc drift first.

## Notes

- Repo: <org/repo>
- CI logs: <link or local path>
- Output dirs: see Outputs table above.
- Schedule: see calendar above.
- Budget: 700k tokens/week.

Step 3. Approve the weekly plan

aweek plan drafts all sixteen tasks at the times above. Review and approve.

Step 4. Read on Monday

The team reads triage/prs-[week].md, triage/issues-[week].md, and sprints/next-week.md before Monday standup. The weekly review informs the team's monthly retrospective.

Why one agent, not sixteen specialists?

The tasks share the repo, the team, and the recent commits. One agent reads git log and the codebase once per tick (cached) and Friday's reviews can read across all of the week's outputs without delegation overhead.

Split when one area's signal-to-noise is so different that it needs its own system prompt (security advisories often qualify), or when two repos have separate budgets that shouldn't cross.

Multi-agent handoff

For organizations with multiple repos, hire one engineer-[repo] per repo and use aweek delegate-task to roll their outputs up to a single engineer-rollup agent that drafts a fleet-wide retro every Friday.