# Hoard things you know how to do A big part of software engineering skill is understanding what's possible and having at least a rough idea of how to accomplish it. But theoretical knowledge is not the same as demonstrated capability. [[Simon Willison]] argues that engineers should build a deep personal collection of working solutions, proof-of-concepts, and documented tricks, accompanied by proof that they work. This is [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]] applied to engineering craft. The collection serves as a confidence builder (you've seen it done), a problem-solving toolkit (recombination of known solutions), and, crucially, a powerful input for [[AI Agents]]. Agents can search your repositories, fetch existing tools, and repurpose solutions across projects. You only ever need to figure out a useful trick once. The most valuable application is recombination. Willison demonstrates this by taking two separate working examples (Tesseract.js for OCR and PDF.js for PDF rendering), feeding both to an agent, and asking it to combine them into a browser-based PDF OCR tool. Neither solution alone would have solved the problem. The combination, enabled by the hoarded knowledge, created something new. Practical hoarding formats include blogs, TIL (Today I Learned) sites, GitHub repositories with proof-of-concepts, single-page HTML tools, and research repositories. The format matters less than the habit: capture what works, with evidence that it works, and make it findable. This pattern resonates deeply with the PKM philosophy: your [[Knowledge Management (KM)|knowledge system]] becomes a force multiplier when combined with AI. At higher [[Levels of AI Context Management]], the knowledge system is the home of your AI agents. They don't just use it; they build on it. ## References - https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/hoard-things-you-know-how-to-do/ ## Related - [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]] - [[Knowledge Management (KM)]] - [[Agentic Engineering]] - [[AI Agents]] - [[Levels of AI Context Management]] - [[Agentic Knowledge Management (AKM)]] - [[Simon Willison]]