AI Engineering
AI-Assisted Development
Working With Coding Agents
A working engineer's guide to building and maintaining production software with autonomous terminal coding agents.
About this book
Terminal coding agents can now read a codebase, plan a change, edit many files, run the tests, and hand you a diff. Used well, they compress hours of mechanical work into minutes; used carelessly, they produce confident, plausible, and wrong changes faster than any human could.
AI-Assisted Development is a practical guide to using them well, for working developers who want to move faster without giving up control of quality, security, or their git history. Its method is simple: the human designs, the agent executes, and a human-reviewed diff is the gate between the two.
Git, tests, context files, and a sandbox are the four backbones that make that safe. The book builds each one, then adds the judgment no tool supplies: what to delegate, what to keep, how to review what comes back, and when to stop a session.
Part I maps the tools and walks through a controlled first session. Part II covers daily practice, from sandboxing and prompting to refactoring, diff review, git micro-commits, and testing. Part III scales the practice to local and cloud models, custom tools, teams, and CI, and closes with the anti-patterns and maintenance habits that keep it healthy.
Because tool names and flags change quickly, the book anchors on durable patterns and treats specific commands as illustrations to adapt.
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