// LLM integration, RAG, MCP, context engineering, agentic coding, evals, token economics.
Agentic coding tools are systems with mechanics — ReAct loops, context windows, token budgets, subagent spawning — not magic boxes. Understanding those mechanics is what makes the difference between using them and being used by them.
The practical surface: LLM integration and RAG, MCP treated as an architectural primitive rather than a plugin format, prompt and context engineering, and the Anthropic Claude API in production side projects. At work it also means LLM-assisted security triage — running CWE analysis over the output of a scanner built to find chained exploit paths conventional SAST misses, and dispositioning each finding with model-assisted review.
Evals and token economics belong in the same list because neither is optional at scale. A pipeline you can't measure is a pipeline you can't trust, and a pipeline you can't price is one you can't ship.