10 Lessons for Agentic Coding

A curated list of 10 practical lessons for working effectively with AI coding agents like Codex and Claude Code. Key takeaways include: implement early to surface hidden decisions, rebuild often since code is cheap, invest in end-to-end behavioral tests rather than implementation tests, document intent alongside code, keep specs updated as code evolves, focus effort on the genuinely hard problems (security, performance, architecture), automate easy tasks, develop strong domain taste since fast code outpaces external feedback, recognize that experienced developers bring irreplaceable intuition to prompts, and remember that while code generation is cheap, maintenance and security costs remain real.