In the last post, I explained the basic concepts of agentic coding - the terminology, the constructs, when to use what. It was mostly theoretical. This post is the practical follow-up that describes how I actually build features with AI agents day to day.
I hesitate to call these ‘best practices’ because in this fast moving space, it just means ‘what someone discovered last week’. So, think of this as a field report: here’s what works for me today, and why.
I used to think that I love coding, but in the last year, I came to realize that what I love more is building - creating something useful and beautiful. Last year this time, my coding workflow was to fire up VS Code with Claude in the browser or GitHub Copilot in ‘Ask’ mode and brainstorm with a model, review solutions suggested by the LLM, copy code into the editor, test and deploy🚀. This was fun in the beginning, but soon the context-switching became tedious and broke the flow of building.
Today I tried something fun - built a Pomodoro timer app mostly by talking to AI instead of typing code myself. And guess what - there is a term for it - vibe coding, coined by Andrej Karpathy 😎.
I have done it a few times before, but this is the first time I am using it to build a full app. I wanted to create something that was useful and worked well, so I chose the Pomodoro timer. Here’s how it went and my key takeaways from this way of building products.
Today I tried Claude Code, the new agentic coding tool announced by Anthropic this morning. Unlike other agentic tools, Claude Code is a CLI tool.
Claude has been my favorite AI coding partner so far. I use it via GitHub Copilot and as standalone through its web interface. I was curious to see how it works in CLI and decided to give it a try.
In this post, I share my first impressions of using Claude Code - how I set it up, what I loved about it, what I didn’t, and how it compares to other similar tools.