Full Walkthrough: Workflow for AI Coding — Matt Pocock
Apr 24, 2026 · 1:36:30
Matt Pocock presents a hands-on workshop on building a full AI-assisted coding workflow, arguing that software engineering fundamentals—not hype—make agents effective. He introduces the 'smart zone' and 'dumb zone' of LLMs (performance drops after ~100k tokens) and the 'Memento problem' (agents forget between sessions). His process starts with a 'Grill Me' skill that relentlessly questions the user until shared understanding is reached, then produces a PRD without reading it, slices work into vertical 'tracer bullet' issues, and runs agents AFK using TDD. He advocates designing codebases with deep, testable modules and shows Sandcastle, a TypeScript library for parallel agent execution with separate implementer (Sonnet) and reviewer (Opus). The workshop transforms ambiguous briefs into shippable features while keeping humans in the loop for QA and taste.
