About
What this site is, how we curate it, and how to navigate it.
What this site is
Tessl Patterns is a curated index of emerging patterns in AI-enabled engineering. It tracks how the industry is adapting to agentic coding — from the individual developer's workflow to org-wide programs. It is editorial in nature: patterns and practices are selected and framed by the Tessl team based on what is emerging from the field, and supported with quotes and links from real sources — engineering blogs, talks, postmortems, and research.
We are regularly updated but do not claim to be exhaustive or real-time. Each pattern carries a last reviewed date so you can see when we last assessed it against new industry signal.
How we curate
- We are editors, not aggregators. Patterns are selected by the Tessl team based on signals from the industry. Selection itself reflects a point of view — we choose what to surface and how to frame it.
- Vendor-aware, neutral in intent. We link to vendor content where it is the best available source, and we label it as vendor-produced. We represent the pattern, not the product.
- Evidence-led and honest about limits. Claims are backed by primary sources. Contested patterns surface the debate rather than resolving it.
- Last reviewed dates signal care. They mark when content was last assessed against new signal — not a guarantee of completeness.
Relationship to Tessl
Tessl Patterns sits alongside the Tessl product but is distinct from it. Tessl Patterns is patterns you learn to understand how AI-enabled engineering is evolving. The patterns here stand on their own merit.
Theme, pattern, practice
Content sits in three levels:
- A theme is a chapter heading that clusters related patterns addressing the same broad shift — for example, The Changing Engineering Role.
- A pattern is a persona-agnostic description of a recurring approach — the shared vocabulary. Anyone can read it and mean the same thing. It carries the metadata.
- A practice is a concrete way to apply a pattern, written for one or more audiences. This is where the content diverges by role.
Scopes and personas
Navigation is organized by theme; you can filter by who you are. We write for four personas, grouped into three scopes by org scale:
- Individual & Team — the Practitioner (hands on the tools daily) and the Team Lead (making a team of 5–10 effective with AI).
- Across Teams — the Platform / DX Driver standardizing AI-enabled engineering across teams, plus the Team Lead as a bridge.
- Organizational — the VP of Engineering running the program: hiring, measurement, governance, culture.
Each scope has a Start Here path — a short, curated entry point for someone new to it.
Reading the metadata
Each pattern carries a domain tag (Tech / People / Process) and a scope (Individual & Team, Across Teams, Organizational), shown as subtle labels by the title — secondary organizing layers, not a ranking. (Maturity and Contested labels are temporarily hidden pending a review.)
How to navigate
The sidebar groups patterns by theme; expand a pattern to see its practices, and use the persona chips to filter to the audience you care about. New here? Pick a Start Here path for your scope from the home page.