If you're already using Cursor or Claude Code, you're closer to agent-based engineering than you think. This talk is a practical on-ramp for engineers ready to move past IDE autocomplete and into agents that live in Slack, open their own PRs, and update tickets on their own — without jumping straight into a standalone agent framework you don't need yet. I'll walk through the four things that actually make an agent work — interface, tools, guardrails, and workflow — starting with the tools you already have, and share the mistakes I made at each step so you can skip them, as you go from one agent to a few.
