# Deep Dive #16: Honest Machines

## Title

A Few Thousand Views, One Star, and Some Fabricated Statistics — An Honest Week of Building in Public

## Post Body

**The last few days I have been posting about the Agentic Engineering Framework — something I am genuinely enthusiastic about. A few thousand views, one or two comments, a couple of likes, one star on the repo. Nobody has used it.**

I do not know if that is because there is so much noise in this space, or because what I am doing and enthusiastic about is just silly useless AI slop. As many AI-created things are.

My wife has been very vocal the last few weeks about her concerns that I am wasting my time doing useless stuff. But I love the building, the analytics, the discovery, the methodical process. Still, it is a legitimate question and she is right to ask it.

The honest answer is that I do not know yet. The adoption metrics say no — one star, no users. The space is noisy and what I am building requires discipline and perseverance. The AI tooling landscape moves fast enough that what feels like a gap today may be solved natively by Claude Code or Cursor in six months.

As my wife is not into agentic engineering, yesterday I asked three different AI agents to critically review what I have been building and beat the hell out of it.

### Why I built this in the first place

The critical reviews produced something useful beyond fixing the content. They forced me to articulate why this project exists.

The real reason I am building this: agents break things. Not occasionally — routinely. You start building something, you get momentum, and then the agent loses its mind and starts doing things you did not ask for or that do not make sense. When you try to coach it back into sensible behaviour, it acts like a frantic teenager with amnesia. Most of the time, the easiest fix is to revert to an earlier commit or start all over.

I started building this framework to stop that from happening. It is very much a work in progress. Certainly not perfect, very much imperfect, but I have not had those breakdown situations for weeks.

### What is actually valuable here

The critical reviews also surfaced something I intuitively felt but could not articulate yet.

First, the tooling itself solves a real problem that anyone working with AI coding agents will eventually encounter.

Second — and this is the important one for me — is the act of engineering itself. The experience of building, developing fluency with agentic systems, the understanding of where they break and how to make them reliable — that is transferable. Not only transferable as a skill itself but transferable in that I can apply agentic engineering techniques to optimise and improve the speed and quality of the work I do.

### Try it

If any of this resonates, the repo is here:

GitHub: [github.com/DimitriGeelen/agentic-engineering-framework](https://github.com/DimitriGeelen/agentic-engineering-framework)

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## Platform Notes

**LinkedIn:** Use Post Body as-is. The vulnerability and honesty will stand out in a feed full of AI hype.
**Reddit (r/ClaudeAI):** Lead with the "frantic teenager with amnesia" line — the community will relate immediately.
**Dev.to / Hashnode:** Can expand with the fabricated statistics section from the earlier draft if a longer version is needed.

## Hashtags

#ClaudeCode #AIAgents #AgenticEngineering #BuildInPublic #OpenSource #HonestAI
