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Six New Tips for Better Coding With Agents
Author’s note
This post was for the true early adopters. While the industry was still arguing about whether agents are useful, I was introducing concepts like Agent UX (AX). The tips in this post are all still useful a year later: use Beads, do a ton more validation, focus on AX. It's a fast read, but useful.
AI Notes
A field report written from Sydney during a Commonwealth Bank of Australia workshop week with Gene Kim, December 2025. The frame: the Vibe Coding book closed in early 2025 and is still completely applicable, but a year of running the book's techniques in real engineering organisations has produced new themes that didn't make the print deadline. The post is a tour of six of them in no particular order, with the throwaway-software observation at the top because it is the one that reorganises every other piece of advice underneath it — Anthropic is already moving this way internally, and the rest of the industry will follow whether it wants to or not.
Read it after the Vibe Coding book, not instead of it.
Related listings
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2025
Cheese Wars: Rise of the Vibe Coder
The companion economic argument — if shelf life is under a year, the labour market for code-writers is the next thing that breaks.
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2026
The Future of Coding Agents
Where the practice goes next, written one workshop cycle later.
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2024
The Death of the Stubborn Developer
A year earlier, on who gets left behind by the tooling shift this essay reports back from.