CODING WITH AI AGENTS

Direct an AI coding agent. Stay in charge of the result.

An AI coding agent can write a plausible change in seconds. Whether that change is correct, safe, and what you meant is still up to you. Coding with AI Agents teaches the habits that close the gap: specify before you build, plan before you edit, work in small tasks, test as you go, debug from evidence, and review everything the agent produces.

The method is tool-neutral. It works with terminal agents, editor agents, and cloud agents, and the book explains each category and what to check before you trust it. Every product detail was checked against the makers' own documentation in November 2026 and is dated, because tools change quickly.

Build one real program from start to finish. You specify, plan, build, extend, test, debug, and harden a small Python command-line tracker. Every listing was run, and every test result shown was produced by the tests.

Inside the book
• How agents work, where they help and where they fail, with the evidence reported honestly
• A safe workspace: permissions, sandboxes, secrets, and project instruction files
• Prompts and context management, with reusable templates
• Specifications, acceptance criteria, design decisions, and task breakdown
• Building a first version, changing existing code, and refactoring safely
• Tests as guardrails, including how to spot weak tests
• Saved commands, hooks, skills, subagents, and tool connections, and their risks
• A debugging method, tracebacks, logging, and bisecting history
• Reviewing generated code, fake packages, security risks, and prompt injection
• Branches, pull requests, parallel agents, and measuring your own results honestly

Twelve chapters in five parts, practice reviews with worked answers, nine appendices of templates and checklists, the complete example source, a glossary, references, and an index.

Who it is for Adult beginners who want to learn alongside an AI assistant, and working developers who want a dependable way to direct one. The examples use Python, and no prior experience with any particular tool is needed.
This book makes no promises about income or employment. It teaches a method and shows you how to check that it works for you.