The guides · № 3 · 9 steps draft

Working with Coding Agents

Concrete patterns that survive real use: what to watch out for, and the habits worth building. Written for humans to adopt one step at a time; every step ends with an optional paste-into-Claude block that sets it up for you.

Distilled from one practitioner's measured usage: logged sessions, the incidents that recurred, and the patterns that stopped them. v0. Step slugs are stable; chapters may be cut or reordered before 1.0.

The steps

Ordered by leverage-per-effort, but every step stands alone: start where it hurts. In a hurry, step 0 is the baseline in one paste.

1. 00 The one-paste baseline

   Optional full-package setup: working agreements, verification gates, and the failure lists installed as review passes, in one confirmation-gated paste.

2. 01 Write down what bit you

   A working-agreements section in the file your agent reads every session: one-line gates distilled from your own incidents, not a borrowed style guide.

3. 02 Prove it before and after

   The three-part verification loop: baseline before fix, small proof before long cycle, serve don't describe.

4. 03 Make the agent interview you

   Design back-and-forth before code: plan mode, open questions one at a time, forks named and picked by you, approval before edits.

5. 04 Reviews that try to kill the work

   Adversarial review: independent reviewers with distinct lenses try to refute the work, findings are verified before anything gets fixed.

6. 05 Fan out, then funnel

   Orchestration shapes that survive contact: parallel readers, find→verify pipelines, and a labeled task queue with a harvest pass for background agents.

7. 06 Build lots of small tools

   Many small, composable tools beat one maintained app: smaller blast radius, free composition across disciplines, and repetition tells you when to build one.

8. 07 Views on demand, not apps

   JIT HTML UI: keep data structured, have the agent generate a self-contained HTML view when you want to look, and keep the renderer.

9. 08 Graduate protocol to hooks

   Rules a script can check shouldn't stay prose: edit-time advisory hooks that flag findings mechanically. Advisory, never a judgment-replacing gate.

Check your work against

The guide's watch-out half lives in two numbered failure lists; every "watch out" above cites them by id: The Prose Failure List (PF-01…24, taste) · The Agent Workflow Failure List (AF-01…18, verification).

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