10 Tips for AI-Assisted Coding

10 Tips To Level Up Your AI-Assisted Coding is an absolutely wonderful talk from the latest NDC London conference. Alex Stensby shares practical recommendations on how to improve interaction with coding agents:

🔸 Context is King. Context is a limited resource, so we must actively manage it:
- Provide enough context for the task: role, file references, specs, schemas, logs, etc.
- Explicitly request the agent to ask additional questions if more information is needed. It helps to prevent hallucinations.
- Start a new context for each new feature to keep agent focused.
- Summarize the progress and save it to md file for future work.
🔸 Rules & Docs make all the difference. Actively document contracts, specifications, database schema, use AGENT.md to set the initial context of the project, build a library of reusable skills.
🔸 Make a plan. Always use plan mode. It forces the LLM not to go with the first suitable solution but to reflect on the task. Review the plan, give feedback on it, "make it your plan".
🔸 Break it down. Break complex tasks into smaller manageable pieces of work, keep track of them in md file or github issues, track the progress.
🔸 Pick the right model. Use a cheaper model for simpler tasks. But Alex said that he uses the latest Opus 4.x for all coding tasks now.
🔸 Use the tools. Turn repetitive prompts into skills or slash commands, use subagents to run work in parallel or focus on specific task types (e.g., architect, code reviewer, QA specialist)
🔸 Git everything & learn from rabbit holes. Ask AI to learn from and reflect on its mistakes, save results in md files and add it to the memory.
🔸 Power up with MCPs. Use MCPs carefully, especially with databases or other resources where AI can make dangerous changes, better to give it read-only access only.
🔸 Release the agents. Use multiple agents to solve different tasks, orchestrate them, fork their context to explore other options, send them for remote execution when needed.
🔸 Be the human in the loop. Agents make mistakes. That's a fact. So we must review and verify work results.

I definitely recommend watching the full video, as it contains not only common tips for using AI agents but it also has a lot of practical examples of Claude Code usage.

#engineering #ai