Agentic Coding

Day 4: The Process

Key question: How do we plan and execute work?

Today's ACIs

ACI Name Takeaway
ACI-005 Steel Threads Beat Feature Branches Small, scoped, end-to-end work units with explicit design-before-code. Steel threads give the agent bounded context and the human verifiable milestones.
ACI-019 Session Lifecycle as Missing Primitive Coding sessions have a lifecycle: start, plan, execute, verify, finish, handoff. The handoff step is the most commonly skipped and the most expensive to omit.
ACI-022 Done Means Enough, Not All A steel thread is done when the objective is met, not when every possible improvement has been made. "Done" is a human decision.
ACI-021 The Batch-Creation Antipattern Creating 20 tasks in one planning session produces waste. Most batch-created items become stale before they are started. Plan in small batches.
ACI-009 CLAUDE.md Stagnation as Health Signal If CLAUDE.md has not been edited in a month, either the project is stable or the methodology has stagnated. The edit history is a diagnostic signal.
ACI-012 Methodology Transfer Velocity New projects adopt methodology faster than existing ones. The learning curve is real but it flattens fast.