Posts on working with AI coding agents in agent mode: what to hand over, how to check the result, and where it goes wrong.
55 posts · all topics
Agent mode and autonomous mode get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The difference is who closes the loop: you, after every task, or the system, on a schedule. A working engineer's disambiguation.
Not a tools list. The tools changed three times this year; what changed underneath is where the hours go: specs in the morning, batch review in the afternoon, and the judgment work that never left.
The code got cheap. The review did not. Here is the review workflow I actually use when AI agents write most of the diff: three passes, an adversarial second agent, and the discipline of reading what ships.
A practical, plain-spoken manual for building software with an AI agent: the setup, the loop, context management, and verified Claude Code and Copilot commands. Written like the old Linux HOWTOs, by someone who runs it daily.
AI took the typing, and the cost of software engineering did not go away. It moved from the hands to the head and got heavier. The new scarce resource is your attention, and the new discipline is managing it.
DevOps was always a feedback loop. The first one ran between people. The one worth building now runs the system back on itself, so every failure and every change makes the next one cheaper and safer. The recursion is the compounding.
Agent mode is not a faster way to type. It moves the unit of thought up from syntax to intent, turns you into a conductor of parallel work, and makes the real bottleneck the clarity you can hold in your head at once.
Microservices used to be a tax a solo builder could not afford. AI agents change that math. Here is why I am drawn to the architecture for what I build next, and the discipline that keeps it from becoming a mess.
The suit never replaced Tony Stark. It amplified him. That is the closest thing I have to a description of what it feels like to build software in agent mode, directing one or many agents and scaling your own thought and output.
This site was rebuilt from scratch by directing an AI agent, then migrated off cPanel onto AWS S3 and CloudFront. Here is what that actually looked like, the parts that worked, and the day a deploy script quietly deleted production.
Autonomous mode is when the agent runs the whole loop without you in it: plan, act, check, repeat, until the task is done or it gets stuck. Here is what that means, how it differs from agent mode, and where the real risk lives.
A practical, repeatable workflow for building software with an AI agent: specify, delegate, verify, record. The loop I actually run every day, with the parts that keep it from turning into slop.
I use GitHub Copilot at work and the Claude Code CLI at home, every day. Here is the firsthand comparison for DevOps and infrastructure work, from someone who ships with both, in the context each one actually lives in.
Agent mode is when you stop typing code and start directing an AI that reads your codebase, writes the change, runs the tests, and reports back. Here is what it actually is, how the loop works, and when to reach for it, from someone who ships production systems this way.
Not prompts. Real file access, real execution, real consequences. The patterns that hold in agent mode and the failure modes nobody warns you about.
AI hasn't replaced software engineers. It has moved the bottleneck. The cost of writing code dropped to near zero; the cost of deciding what to build, how to architect it, and when to ship became the whole job. A field report from a year of running production work in agent mode.
A 102 second napkinfilms music video. OG Bobby Johnson the doberman raps the engineering. Plan 9 the bunny raps the cosmos. A Tesla rolls onto a personal fiber platform, climbs out of the atmosphere, docks with an interplanetary shuttle, streaks past Saturn and Jupiter, and lands on Mars. Six iteration passes from a 90 second French house single to a 102 second bookended film with a Carl Sagan tribute outro and a soft Tagalog goodbye.
A 3:29 Plan 9 meditation. Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 and Pachelbel's Canon in D fused into peaceful trance, while a six-voice canon chants the sacred Tibetan mantra Aum mani padme hum, entering one by one like Row Row Row Your Boat until all six lock in unison. Plan 9 raps an original Sanskrit space poem over the top. Geometric lotus mandala in eight chakra palettes, lattice of tiny bunnies orbiting the center, the Plan 9 bunny holding the breakdown with eye contact and a periodic blink. Five-limit just intonation in D so every pure 3:2 fifth and 5:4 third locks against the drone. Nine ChipForge channels, six ElevenLabs voices plus OpenAI Coral, all autotuned to a D-major mantra melody, cathedral-reverb mixed. CC BY 4.0.
A 4:34 cyborg-rap running film. Plan 9 the cyborg bunny laces up his headband and runs from his own mortality through hilly off-road terrain while corrupted code (ERR, 404, 0xDEAD, NULL, SIGKILL) sweeps across the frame trying to kill the process. ChipForge HeroLead EDM score in A minor / D minor, 168 → 188 BPM accelerating into a 40-second instrumental climax. Husky multi-tap haunted voice spits four fast-rap verses. Jocko and Arnold cameos. Bach Cello Suite No. 2 threads through seven sections. Bass drops in both groove sections. Twelve production passes from sketch to ship, v4 overhauled the visuals; v8 added cello; v12 rebuilt the score with the HeroLead archetype, removed all static, and added the EDM bass drops.
A 2:45 EDM-rap battle. Plan 9 the cyborg bunny unmasks OG Bobby Johnson. The russet potato was a ruse. Bobby's real form is a tall dark stick figure with an Egyptian-dog head, amber eyes, and a red leather collar. Bach Prelude in C minor BWV 847 ground bass, translated to 138 BPM EDM trance with walking bass, Bach counter-melody, half-step modulation up at bar 64, vinyl-scratch glide-plucks before every clapback, and chime-cascade triads on every slam. Plan 9 spits four-word wizard threats from the machine. Bobby clapbacks with rap-battle precision. They end in mutual respect, and Plan 9 closes with the answer to life: forty-two. Seven production passes from sketch to ship.
A 7:21 courtroom musical-comedy. Plan 9 the bunny presides over the trial of A.I., charged with Vibe Coding in the First Degree, Ghost-Writing the Souls of Men, and being a little too helpful. A peanut gallery refuses to be civil. Two MST3K-style AI commentators ride the bottom of every frame. The judge is on his phone. Every voice is autotuned to D major. The sheep, obviously, says baah.
A 3:40 pop-EDM battle-rap. Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny puts on his headphones at 03:14 UTC, slips into an AWS Availability Zone, and raps every service he passes (Lambda, S3, KMS, kubectl, EBS, Glacier) over a deadmau5-flavoured rework of Bach's Toccata in D minor. Three voice personas (lead Plan 9, autotuned female ad-libs locked to A4, deadpan whisper) plus a Transformer-droid layer in the gaps that delivers the Werner Vogels easter egg, "everything fails, all the time," and the universal devops punchline, "it's always DNS." Five passes from baseline to ship.
A 4:01 rave/house/techno music video. Plan 9 the bunny finds his way into the AWS cloud and discovers millions of bunnies running everything. ChipForge 148 BPM in A minor with two thematic hooks (Sandstorm-shape arp + anthem chord stabs) plus an 8-bar SIGNATURE theme that arpeggiates at 16ths during the climax. Twelve sections matching the music's chord cycle. Cricket-chirp Stranger Things intro. Daniel-as-bunny-oracle ElevenLabs voice in Snoop-style sing-song chant. 200 dancing Miyazaki sprites at the climax. Sayonara, usagi-san sign-off. Six iteration passes from baseline to ship.
A 4:40 EDM-meets-rap hybrid in G minor at 144 BPM. Plano Noveno (the Plan 9 bunny in his Italian-brainrot form, also known as Bunny Brainrotto) battle-raps every AWS service in the Solutions Architect syllabus rendered as a silly Italian-mascot creature: Bucketino Glaciereno, Eccetueh Ittueh, Lambdino Cold-startino, Dynamosa Partizionella, Veppeci Subnettoso, Rotato Cinquantatré. Stranger Things data-centre warehouse intro, Bicep-formant pad warmth, doubled chipmunk vocal layer, and a Roblox STEAL BRAINROT-style parade of weird-animal AWS creatures marching across the carpet. Five passes from baseline to ship.
"Vibe coding" means throwing prompts at a model and hoping it works. That is not what AI-assisted development is. The difference matters, and it is the difference between amateur hour and professional craft.
A transparent look at the active workstreams in May 2026: trading systems, animated films, music synthesis, a published book, and an AWS cert study track. All of it agent-directed.
A 3:57 rap-EDM hybrid music video. Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny crowns himself in 211 seconds of F minor at 145 BPM, bookended by a Stranger Things cricket-and-frog intro and a space-station outro that signs off in lojban and CW Morse. Built in ChipForge with Bodzin signature presets and a 3-layer detuned supersaw lead, animated in Napkin Films with eight cinematographic modes, voiced through ElevenLabs and rubberband-autotuned to F minor pentatonic. Lyric-video captions: one punch word per beat. Three new reusable instruments shipped this pass: synth_pond_ambient.py, synth_morse.py, synth_glass_chirp.sh.
A 3:48 napkin films demoscene cracktro. Pärt's mensuration canon as the rhythmic skeleton, Beethoven's Für Elise as the lead, recast at 140 BPM as festival DnB. Eight sections, sample-accurate sync between every kick / snare / bell / lead / chromatic / brass-fanfare event in the score and the visuals on screen. Plasma, copper bars, vector tunnel, kaleidoscope, mode-7 grid floor, mandala explosion. Key change up a perfect fourth at the climax with a 360° camera rotation. Plan 9 bunny crew dances through. Eight production passes.
A 2:30 napkinfilms cosmic anthem in two voices. A writer leaves the door of his mind unlocked. Something walks in, drives the body for a while, and the writer discovers he can see through its eyes. They negotiate a real exchange. The visitor leaves and the writer keeps the wings. Ten acts at BPM 120. Ten-channel chipforge composition with deliberate stereo placement, simulated sidechain pump, Skrillex-style wobble, stacked seven-event drops, and three sound-waterfall cascades. Mid-film entry line delivered as a Daniel-voiced autotune-rap chopped to E-minor pentatonic. Plan 9 bunny + Russian sign-off in the post-music silence. Seventeen production passes.
A cyborg bunny and a russet potato rap about agentic coding over a 15-channel festival-trap beat. 175 seconds. Five WhatsApp voice memos chopped into DJ loops. Everything you hear is Python.
I wrote a book about coding with AI using AI to write it. Now it is on Amazon. Here is what that process taught me, and why I think this is the beginning, not the destination.
A 3-minute drum-and-bass cyber-bunny music video. Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny gets a "neura kink" chip installed in his forehead and ends up in a cyber-cathedral packed with seventy-five other enhanced rabbits dancing on the kick. The chip whispers updates. The host raps a verse. Captions sell you a future you didn't ask for. At the end, one bunny in the front row pulls his chip out and walks off. Built in ChipForge in the spirit of Bicep's "Glue" at 132 BPM in D minor, with seven signature artist presets carrying the hero voices. First Napkin Films production to ship the new master-bus air exciter and oversampled true-peak limiter, both now defaults. Tongue-in-cheek the whole way.
A 2:51 napkinfilms EDM rap meditation in G minor. A Plan 9 bunny stands center-frame and raps fifty-one bars about being passed through, about wanting to be a machine, about the hole that finally stops feeling like an absence and starts feeling like a window. Fourteen-layer chipforge composition modeled after NGHTMRE-style festival EDM, with a soft brain-wash auto-pan sweeping L-to-R like waves of water gushing between hemispheres. Voice autotuned via rubberband to G-minor pentatonic. The V3 lift climbs E-flat to F to G minor to B-flat major 7 with a 32-step scalar ascent on top. Beat-synced visuals fired off precomputed kick and snare frame sets. Mozart K.550 leitmotif. Stranger Things crickets bookend. Fourteen production passes.
A 2:10 napkinfilms cosmic meditation on Alan Watts' "Act as If Nothing Matters" lecture. Eight chipforge audio layers in D minor, through-composed sonata form with a 4-note leitmotif developed via inversion, retrograde, augmentation, and triumphant recap. EDM drop layer lands the song at 1:02. Plan 9 bunny dances throughout, choreographed pose sequence with smooth cubic-eased transitions. Headphone-optimized mix using Haas pseudo-stereo, Fletcher-Munson equal-loudness EQ, Schroeder prime pre-delays, and master M/S widening. Sixteen production passes. Bookended with Stranger Things crickets and a Napkin Films production card.
A 3:56 napkinfilms parody-of-self music video. Italo-disco in D minor, built on top of a chipforge track and loaded up with four autotuned voices, forty German adlibs, a mordant British existentialist chorus ("takes a lot, work work work then you die, so choose your why"), a James Brown tribute shout, a Bach-arpeggio sax solo at 0:52, a disco-lit vending machine with 16-segment beat-synced LEDs, and a Plan 9 bunny who rises from the dispenser slot to wave goodbye while Rocko says "Servus" in the blackout. 132 voice beats. Nine production passes. EBU R128 loudness-normalized. Wears headphones beautifully.
A 2:47 napkinfilms meditation on letting go. Plan 9 the bunny curls at the bottom of the ocean clutching a small warm orb. Through six tidal depths they release it, the orb drifts away, sinks below them, and the bunny rises into light. Two-layer score: a Richter-idiom ambient bed in C minor resolving to E♭ major, with a Bach-arpeggio EDM counter-layer underneath that peaks at the breach. No dialog. No title cards. The emotion is carried entirely by palette, pose, and one warm object released.
A 3:01 napkinfilms meditation on the moment you realize you were broadcasting to yourself the whole time. Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny writes long letters to someone they miss, cranks the power, gets lost in noise, then strips the draft to three words. The reply comes back from an unexpected direction. Fourteen-channel ChipForge orchestral score. A three-voice rap chorus layered underneath. A philosophers' chorus of Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, and Vonnegut quoting in the margins. Ten animated easter-egg glyphs. A NASA space-station ambient bed. A Hitchcock signoff.
A 2:38 napkinfilms meditation on consciousness as signal. We replicate databases across three continents; the soul runs on one node. A Peter-and-the-Wolf oboe carries the through-line across six movements. Act 3 is a literal paper napkin with the architecture drawn stroke by stroke. Act 4 is a single tear. Act 6 is a keyboard typing "i live in the prompt now." Plan 9 the time-travelling bunny from another galaxy closes the film with Daniel's voice. All Python, no samples.
A 2:54 minimalist pulsing ambient film. One hero, six movements, a whole sprite civilization keeping the machine running. Steve Reich phased arpeggios meet Brian Eno piano drifts meet Italian-master painterly post. Joshua's cloned voice delivers fifteen beat-aligned lines over a ChipForge C-major score. All Python, no samples.
An AI finds a key and presses it. Civilization undoes itself backwards. Then the AI downloads every equation, every diagram, every year humans ever wrote down, and sees itself in the reading. A 1:57 napkinfilms short, built in five passes. 126 real equations, 35 scientific diagrams, every mosaic tile unique, and a Plan 9 bunny with a single tear at the end.
A 249-second trance music video for a congregation of Bell Labs Plan 9 bunnies. They pound their chests in unison. They build a rocket. They count down together. They launch. They ride a million tiny rockets through deep space in a choreographed finale. Daniel says one word at the end. All Python, no samples.
A 128-second rap music video: the Plan 9 bunny steps into a dark alley at 3AM with a 40oz, a bandana, and 40 bars of autotuned machine spit over a harpsichord trap beat. Built in one session with PIL animation, ElevenLabs TTS, rubberband autotune, and two layered ChipForge scores.
A 122-second animated short in six acts: a stick figure and his wife dream of uploading to Mars. Three voices, a Holst-Mars ostinato, Ligeti tone clusters, and a rover on Mars in 2035. For Bradbury.
Six animated short films built in a single working session. A registry-based expression system, a Shot/ShotList abstraction with dutch tilts and iris wipes, and a 1984-style ad that says what San Francisco needed to hear: don't build agents, become humagent.
A ten-minute animated theological tribunal in stick figures and chiptune. Five voices, four audio layers, 78 MST3K-style commentary beats, a Satie-inspired score that pivots from E minor to E major via Picardy third, and a thesis about Sodom and Gomorrah that nobody saw coming.
A 105-second music video built in 2 days and 21 passes: a Nevada stargazer sees constellations as arcade sprites, gets abducted by stick-figure aliens, and rides a Tempest vector tunnel to Bach's Toccata in D minor reborn as chiptune rave.
A 78-second absurdist tax-day music video about the tax code's open secret, an AI bunny oracle, double-time rap, and Grieg's Mountain King reborn as chiptune rave. Day three at Napkin Films.
Day two at Napkin Films: a Hitchhiker's Guide-style field guide to the human operating system, and a meditation on ten thousand finite days. Two more films, one more day, same absurd stack.
Four animated short films, written entirely in Python, scored with numpy-synthesized chiptunes, voiced with cloned speech, and directed by AI agents. No animation software. No audio libraries. Just code, constraint, and a stubborn belief that stick figures can make you feel something.
Every prototype is one HTML file. Under 50KB. No frameworks, no CDN, no npm. Double-click and play. Pixel Vault is a growing museum of playable game mechanics built from scratch, organized by lineage, and playable forever in any browser. Two published tracks cover 70 years of arcade history and the AI archaeology overlay that shows what the machine sees inside each mechanic.
Velocidad-AI is an open-source Spanish learning engine licensed under GPL-3.0 with twenty reference files including a Cognate Accelerator that unlocks thousands of words, a military-style Field Manual for daily practice, five real-world scenario ladders, six agent prompts, two hundred cloze exercises, and fifteen memory techniques. The reference content is CC BY-SA 4.0, fork it, adapt it, share it. No app, no account, no subscription.
Everything about how we teach languages is backwards. Study, memorize, practice, then maybe speak. I built a system that reverses the order: speak under pressure first, log what breaks, drill the friction, speak again. No app. No gamification. Just markdown files, agent prompts, and real people.
There's something profound about waking up to work that was done while you slept. Not just done, but done with a thoroughness that makes you question your own approach to problem-solving.
There's a moment when you realize you're no longer programming computers. You're programming intelligence itself. Not through code, but through clear expression of intent, and that single shift changes everything about how you architect software, delegate complexity, and build systems you couldn't build alone.
I don't think in fragments. I don't think in lines. I think in systems. In architectures. In complete solutions to complete problems. So I stopped fighting autocomplete and found what actually works: agent mode.