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Previous Issues of
The Modern Engineer

Issue #36: Agent-Readable Documentation and Context Packs
Issue #36: Agent-Readable Documentation and Context Packs
July 11, 2026
Design a markdown-first documentation context package with llms.txt, source ownership, freshness rules, exclusions, and eval questions so agents can use docs without treating the whole site as context.
Issue #35: Designing Control Loops for AI Agents
Issue #35: Designing Control Loops for AI Agents
July 4, 2026
Loop engineering moves AI work from one prompt at a time to bounded control systems with triggers, gates, state, budgets, and escalation paths.
Issue #34: Prompt Format Languages for AI Engineering
Issue #34: Prompt Format Languages for AI Engineering
June 27, 2026
JSON, XML, YAML, TOML, and TOON each carry different signals inside a prompt. Knowing what the model actually does with each format is how you make format a deliberate engineering decision instead of an afterthought.
Issue #33: Prompt and Context Lineage for Reproducible AI Systems
Issue #33: Prompt and Context Lineage for Reproducible AI Systems
June 20, 2026
Define a production prompt and context lineage contract that records effective model inputs, protects sensitive content, and supports evidence-based incident replay.
Issue #32: Human Approval Gates for High-Risk AI Actions
Issue #32: Human Approval Gates for High-Risk AI Actions
June 12, 2026
Build a local C# approval workflow where risky AI-proposed actions create explicit approval requests, consume scoped expiring tokens, and leave behind auditable decision records.
Issue #31: Session Memory and Context Compaction for Production AI Agents
Issue #31: Session Memory and Context Compaction for Production AI Agents
June 6, 2026
Treat long-running agent context as a controlled system. Pin required facts, compact old history, expire stale notes, and carry forward only what the next turn is allowed to rely on.
Issue #30: MCP Tool Contract Gates for AI Systems
Issue #30: MCP Tool Contract Gates for AI Systems
May 30, 2026
Treat live MCP servers as versioned tool contracts. Discover live schemas, replay frozen probes, and block risky drift before promotion.
Issue #29: Model Upgrade Gates for AI Systems
Issue #29: Model Upgrade Gates for AI Systems
May 23, 2026
Treat model swaps as controlled experiments: frozen evals, shadow replay, deterministic scoring, and explicit promotion gates before an AI system changes models.
Issue #28: AGENTS.md and the Repository Control Plane for Coding Agents
Issue #28: AGENTS.md and the Repository Control Plane for Coding Agents
May 16, 2026
Repository instruction files are becoming the control plane for AI-assisted coding: a short AGENTS.md map, deep docs as the system of record, and task-specific specs for execution.
Issue #27: Agent Interoperability with A2A and Microsoft Foundry on Azure Container Apps
Issue #27: Agent Interoperability with A2A and Microsoft Foundry on Azure Container Apps
May 9, 2026
A gateway that discovers, validates, and delegates to a remote specialist over A2A. Both agents run on Microsoft Foundry and deploy to Azure Container Apps from one image.

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