A practical playbook for engineers who want AI to handle the boilerplate — so they handle the decisions.
Which tools actually earn a spot in your toolchain — and which are just taking up tabs.
How senior engineers structure prompts, manage context windows, and avoid AI hallucinations.
Use AI to prep, reflect, and hand off — so your standups actually take 30 minutes.
Ship scaffolding, tests, and migrations without grinding through the tedious parts.
Systematic AI-assisted debugging — stack traces, edge cases, and the bugs that don't show up in tests.
Use AI to catch the obvious stuff before humans look at it. Save your cognitive budget for the hard parts.
AI drafts, you correct. The fastest way to keep docs from rotting.
How to measure what actually improved — velocity, quality, and the things only you notice.
A senior engineer who ships. Has shipped systems at scale, led teams that shipped under pressure, and spent years watching good engineers waste time on things AI could handle in 30 seconds.
Wrote this playbook because every AI guide out there is either a hype piece or a tutorial for beginners. This is for the engineer who already knows what they're doing — and wants AI to get out of the way, or get in the way effectively.