Index
Department of
ENGINEERING
The war on 'slop' isn't won through clever engineering—it requires keeping human thinking at the center, treating environments as universal abstraction, and investing in model capability over scaffolding.
Vol. 2025 Classified: No Pages: 72
SEC 01
DO NOT OUTSOURCE THE THINKING: Context Engineering & Human-AI Collaboration
AI can only amplify the thinking you've already done
Auth: Jake Nations, Dex Horthy, Beyang Liu
Time: 4 min read
SEC 02
Environments as Universal Abstraction: The New Unit of Everything
A benchmark = environment + starting state + verifier (same as RL environments)
Auth: Will Brown, Eno Reyes, Nik Pash
Time: 3 min read
SEC 03
Reinforcement Learning for Specialized Models: The Economics of Domain Expertise
1000 examples can yield 10-point improvements with ARFT
Auth: Will Hang, Cathy Zhou, Rhythm Garg, Linden Li, Jacob Kahn, Aparna Dhinakaran, Lee Robinson
Time: 3 min read
SEC 03
Skills and Artifacts: The New Building Blocks for Agents
Skills are just folders - procedural knowledge packaged for agents to load dynamically
Auth: Barry Zhang, Mahesh Murag, Kevin Hou, Kat Kampf, Ammaar Reshi
Time: 4 min read
SEC 04
Model Quality Over Scaffolding: Minimalism in Agent Architecture
Use smart models to plan, fast models to execute - deploy the right capability at the right time
Auth: Lee Robinson, Beyang Liu, Joel Becker
Time: 3 min read
SEC 05
Data Collection & Quality as the New Bottleneck
Agents are collecting good data but not sharing it - keeping datasets closed slows research
Auth: Nik Pash, Will Hang, Cathy Zhou, Will Brown, Joel Becker
Time: 3 min read