Agentic Coding Recommendations

Summary

Agentic Coding Recommendations written on Thursday, June 12, 2025 There is currently an explosion of people sharing their experiences with agentic coding. After my last two posts on the topic, I received quite a few questions about my own practices. So, here goes nothing. Preface For all intents and purposes, here's what I do: I predominently use Claude Code with the cheaper Max subscription for $100 a month . That works well for several reasons: I exclusively use the cheaper Sonnet model. It's perfectly adequate for my needs, and in fact, I prefer its outputs over the more expensive Opus model. I optimize my tool usage to be token efficient. I avoid screenshots and browser interactions wherever possible. More on that later. My general workflow involves assigning a job to an agent (which effectively has full permissions) and then waiting for it to complete the task. I rarely interrupt it, unless it's a small task. Consequently, the role of the IDE — and the role of AI in the IDE — is greatly diminished; I mostly use it for final edits. This approach has even revived my usage of Vim, which lacks AI integration. One caveat: I expect this blog post to age very poorly. The pace of innovation here is insane; what was true a month ago barely holds true today. That's why I'm sticking to concepts I believe have staying power. If you want to a small session of me working on an Open Source library with it, I have a recording you can watch. The Basics I disable all permission checks. Which basically means I run claude --dangerously-skip-permissions. More specifically I have an alias called claude-yolo set up. Now you can call that irresponsible and there are definitely risks with it, but you can manage those risks with moving your dev env into docker. I will however say that if you can watch it do its thing a bit, it even works surprisingly well without dockerizing. YMMV. MCP. This is a term you cannot avoid. It basically is a standardized protocol to give agents access to mor...