Working with a senior engineer already fluent in coding agents
Two separate pieces of work with a senior engineer at a big tech company: an interview-plus-agent review that caught a costly blind spot, and codifying their git workflow into personal agent skills.
A senior engineer at a big tech company already used coding agents day to day. We worked together on two separate items that contributed to their work.
The first was a review of a project they were midway through, with some PRs already merged and the rest in progress. We recorded the conversation as I interviewed them about it: the motivations for the project, how it would be carried out and why, the possible edge cases, how it would be rolled out and de-risked, and what success would look like. With that context captured, we prompted the agent to investigate the state of the project alongside the direction we had articulated, grounding its exploration in the code and asking it to raise anything we had missed. It surfaced an element they hadn't accounted for, which proactively saved them roughly two weeks: an override applied elsewhere in the system meant the experiment's treatment wouldn't have reached all of the intended users, so the results couldn't have justified a rollout. Left uncaught, the work would have produced inconclusive metrics and needed to be repeated.
The second was personal-productivity work. We discussed their development workflows in depth, shaped by the constraints and tools they used at work: when they rebased, squashed commits, or added commits on top of what had already been squashed, and why. We codified these as a set of personal skills for their agents, so the agents would default to the workflow the engineer had already been applying by hand rather than needing to be steered toward it each time.