AI coding agents are getting better but generating code is only one part of software engineering. Breaking down work, coordinating agents, testing changes, and maintaining control over the development process are equally important.

That’s why I’m building Orxest - an open-source project exploring how to orchestrate AI coding agents into a software development workflow.

The idea is to move beyond one-off prompts and individual coding sessions toward a system where specialized coding agents can collaborate on well-defined tasks, supported by the right workflows and engineering practices.

Recently I was working on building a local AI agent Iris. An open-source project experiencing how to build a practical AI assistant that runs locally and can do more than just answer questions.

My focus is on the foundations of a capable agent: minimal planning, tool use, and breaking complex goals into manageable steps. The challenge is making these workflows reliable and useful, even when working with smaller local language models.

Driver Issue

I just got an “ESP8266 D1 mini Dev Broad” by a friend of mine, and tried to play around. If you are not familiar, it is an MCU by Espressif company, enhanced by extra features to make it a good dev board.

This dev board is really easy to use (as other Espressif products), specially because of Micro USB (or USB-C) port on it. So you can just connect it to your computer and flash the MCU. Attaching a USB port was possible as dev board has a CH340 USB-to-UART chip. The chip is responsible for converting USB to Serial communication.

Hello World!