Working With AI: What Actually Works For Me

I think a lot of people still imagine AI coding as opening ChatGPT, asking for code, and copy-pasting the result. That's not really how I work anymore. The biggest shift for me is that planning matters far more than coding. Earlier, execution was expensive, so most of the effort went into writing code. Now execution is cheap. I can have an agent implement something in minutes. The hard part is making sure the plan is correct. Most of my effort goes into thinking through the architecture, edge cases, failure modes, test strategy, and how the change fits into the broader system. If the plan is vague, the agent will confidently implement the wrong thing. The quality of the result is mostly determined by the quality of the plan. Once I have a plan, I break it into small independent pieces. Each piece should be executable without additional clarification. If an agent needs to stop and ask questions, the task probably isn't broken down enough. Those pieces become tickets. Then an agent picks up a ticket and implements it. The important thing is that the agent isn't operating in a vacuum. I try to give it a good environment to work in: Clear architectural rules Reusable skills and workflows Guardrails Hooks for things that must always happen One lesson that really stuck with me is that instructions are guidance, not guarantees. At one point I had "always use a git worktree" written in AGENTS.md. The model still ignored it occasionally. When I dug into it, the answer was simple: models can drift from instructions. So if something absolutely must happen, don't rely on instructions. Enforce it. Put it in a hook, script, validation step, CI check, or some other deterministic mechanism. If it is important, make it impossible to skip. Once the implementation is done, the agent opens a PR. This is where another useful pattern comes in: don't let the same model review the code it wrote. I usually have one model implement and another model review. Different models catch different t