When an AI coding assistant goes off track, it can be hard to undo the damage. Developer Terry Lynn mitigates this risk by programming his AI workflow to make a Git commit before and after each small phase of a task. This creates a trail of "breadcrumbs," allowing him to easily revert to a stable state if the AI makes a mistake.
The creative process with AI involves exploring many options, most of which are imperfect. This makes the collaboration a version control problem. Users need tools to easily branch, suggest, review, and merge ideas, much like developers use Git, to manage the AI's prolific but often flawed output.
Use an AI assistant like Claude Code to create a persistent corporate memory. Instruct it to save valuable artifacts like customer quotes, analyses, and complex SQL queries into a dedicated Git repository. This makes critical, unstructured information easily searchable and reusable for future AI-driven tasks.
AI development tools can be "resistant," ignoring change requests. A powerful technique is to prompt the AI to consider multiple options and ask for your choice before building. This prevents it from making incorrect unilateral decisions, such as applying a navigation change to the entire site by mistake.
Tools like Git were designed for human-paced development. AI agents, which can make thousands of changes in parallel, require a new infrastructure layer—real-time repositories, coordination mechanisms, and shared memory—that traditional systems cannot support.
LLMs often get stuck or pursue incorrect paths on complex tasks. "Plan mode" forces Claude Code to present its step-by-step checklist for your approval before it starts editing files. This allows you to correct its logic and assumptions upfront, ensuring the final output aligns with your intent and saving time.
To ensure comprehension of AI-generated code, developer Terry Lynn created a "rubber duck" rule in his AI tool. This prompts the AI to explain code sections and even create pop quizzes about specific functions. This turns the development process into an active learning tool, ensuring he deeply understands the code he's shipping.
When an AI model makes the same undesirable output two or three times, treat it as a signal. Create a custom rule or prompt instruction that explicitly codifies the desired behavior. This trains the AI to avoid that specific mistake in the future, improving consistency over time.
Borrowing from classic management theory, the most effective way to use AI agents is to fix problems at the earliest 'lowest value stage'. This means rigorously reviewing the agent's proposed plan *before* it writes any code, preventing costly rework later on.
AI tools connected to GitHub allow non-technical roles to conduct "forensic investigations" of a codebase. By prompting an AI, they can generate a full timeline of commits and PRs for a specific feature, providing ground-truth context during business incidents without needing engineering help.
To prevent AI coding assistants from hallucinating, developer Terry Lynn uses a two-step process. First, an AI generates a Product Requirements Document (PRD). Then, a separate AI "reviewer" rates the PRD's clarity out of 10, identifying gaps before any code is written, ensuring a higher rate of successful execution.