Helping a CTO make coding agents part of how they build
Working alongside a classically trained CTO to fold coding agents into their real work: capturing a session as context, planning, implementing, and reviewing a PR together.
The CTO of an early-stage technology company was classically trained in engineering and had experimented with agents but hadn't adopted them heavily in their day-to-day coding. We paired together on their actual work for the day.
We started with a conversation about what they needed to accomplish that day, which became the raw context we used to build a technical plan with an agent that we reviewed and refined. That plan was the spec for the implementation. We pushed this first pass implementation PR, reviewed it together in GitHub, and left feedback as comments. The agent processed the feedback and made the changes.
Throughout, I helped this engineer and leader externalize their thought process and turn their domain expertise into the context the agent needed to produce a satisfactory implementation. I introduced processes, like voice-to-text for capturing context and a planning-first approach, while keeping them as hands-on with engineering as they wanted, so the code ended up the way they intended and they didn't feel like they were giving up control of the parts they felt were important.