Chapter
Climb the six tiers — to spend effort only where your work needs it
This guide is one ladder: six tiers, simple → hard. A tier is a level of skill and a level of where you're applying effort.
Climb as your skill, your harness and your confidence grow. Climb only as high as your work demands.
The trick is knowing what pushes you to the next tier — it's always a specific pain, not ambition. Read the pain column of the six tiers at a glance as a diagnostic: find the pain you're feeling now — the next tier is the one that fixes it. Climb there, then stop. Each tier exists to kill a specific failure of the one below it.
The destination, if you go all the way, is professional agentic product engineering: agents running in a loop against a clear, testable standard, inside a real repo you own.
Which tier do you need?
Match the job to a target tier and stop there — climbing higher than the work demands is wasted effort.
| What you're building | Aim for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A landing page, throwaway script, or one-off for yourself | Tier 1–2 — or skip the agent and use a one-shot builder (Lovable/v0/Bolt) | Low stakes, short-lived. A clear prompt is enough; you don't need tests, git discipline, or a loop |
| A feature in a side project you intend to keep | Tier 1–3 | Now correctness matters over time — you want a verify loop and checkpoints so it doesn't rot |
| Production code in a shared team repo | Tier 1–4, reaching into 5–6 as scale demands | Multiple people, real consequences. Context engineering, git hygiene, and review become non-negotiable; orchestration and a hosted execution layer follow when one agent or one machine isn't enough |