Agentic Coding Recommendations
There is currently an explosion of people sharing their experiences with agentic coding. After my last two posts on the topic, I received quite a few questions about my own practices. So, here goes nothing.
Preface For all intents and purposes, here's what I do: I predominently use Claude Code with the cheaper Max subscription for $100 a month . That works well for several reasons: I exclusively use the cheaper Sonnet model. It's perfectly adequate for my needs, and in fact, I prefer its outputs over the more expensive Opus model.
I optimize my tool usage to be token efficient. I avoid screenshots and browser interactions wherever possible. More on that later. My general workflow involves assigning a job to an agent (which effectively has full permissions) and then waiting for it to complete the task. I rarely interrupt it, unless it's a small task. Consequently, the role of the IDE — and the role of AI in the IDE — is greatly diminished; I mostly use it for final edits. This approach has even revived my usage of Vim, which lacks AI integration. One caveat: I expect this blog post to age very poorly. The pace of innovation here is insane; what was true a month ago barely holds true today. That's why I'm sticking to concepts I believe have staying power. If you want to a small session of me working on an Open Source library with it, I have a recording you can watch.
The Basics I disable all permission checks. Which basically means I run claude --dangerously-skip-permissions . More specifically I have an alias called claude-yolo set up. Now you can call that irresponsible and there are definitely risks with it, but you can manage those risks with moving your dev env into docker. I will however say that if you can watch it do its thing a bit, it even works surprisingly well without dockerizing. YMMV. MCP. This is a term you cannot avoid. It basically is a standardized protocol to give agents access to more tools. Honestly: at this point I barely use it, but I do use it. The reason I barely use it is because Claude Code is very capable of just running regular tools. So MCP for me is really only needed if I need to give Claude access to something that finds too hard to use otherwise. A good example for this is the playwright-mcp for browser automation. I use it because I haven't found anything better yet. But for instance when I want my agent to poke around in my database, I just uses whatever it finds to be available. In my case it loves to use psql and that's more than good enough. In general I really only start using MCP if the alternative is too unreliable. That's because MCP servers themselves are sometimes not super reliable and they are an extra thing that can go wrong. Trying to keep things very simple. My custom tools are normal scripts that it just runs.
Choice Of Language I've evaluated agent performance across different languages my workload, and if you can choose your language, I strongly recommend Go for new backend projects. Several factors strongly favor Go: Context system: Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it.
Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it. Test caching: Surprisingly crucial for efficient agentic loops. In Rust, agents sometimes fail because they misunderstand cargo test 's invocation syntax. In Go, tests run straightforwardly and incrementally, significantly enhancing the agentic workflow. It does not need to figure out which tests to run, go does.
Surprisingly crucial for efficient agentic loops. In Rust, agents sometimes fail because they misunderstand 's invocation syntax. In Go, tests run straightforwardly and incrementally, significantly enhancing the agentic workflow. It does not need to figure out which tests to run, go does. Go is sloppy: Rob Pike famously described Go as suitable for developers who aren't equipped to handle a complex language. Substitute “developers” with “agents,” and it perfectly captures why Go's simplicity benefits agentic coding.
Rob Pike famously described Go as suitable for developers who aren't equipped to handle a complex language. Substitute “developers” with “agents,” and it perfectly captures why Go's simplicity benefits agentic coding. Structural interfaces: interfaces in Go are structural. If a type has the methods an interface expects, then it conforms. This is incredibly easy for LLMs to “understand”. There is very little surprise for the agent.
interfaces in Go are structural. If a type has the methods an interface expects, then it conforms. This is incredibly easy for LLMs to “understand”. There is very little surprise for the agent. Go has low eco-system churn: Go's entire ecosystem embraces backwards compatiblity and explicit version moves. This greatly reduces the likelihood of AI generating outdated code — starkly contrasting JavaScript's fast-moving ecosystem for instance. For comparison, Python — my initial choice — often poses significant challenges. Agents struggle with Python's magic (eg: Pytest’s fixture injection) or complex runtime challenges (eg: wrong event loop when working with async), frequently producing incorrect code that even the agentic loop has challenges resolving. Python also has practical performance problems. I don't mean that it writes slow code, i mean that the agent loop is really slow. That's because the agent loves to spawn processes and test scripts, and it can take quite a while for the interpreter to boot up and initialize the entire application. On the frontend I settled on tailwind, react with tanstack's query and router as well as vite. I'm not amazingly happy with it, but I found it better than the alternatives. Tailwind and vite are great, no complaints there. Tanstack's file based router does not make me super happy. In parts because it likes to have dollar signs in the file names and those really like to confuse the agent. For instance it's quite common that it tries to edit $param.tsx but it edits the file .tsx instead because it to confused by shell interpolation. It's a minor thing, but a very annoying thing.
... continue reading