Tooling 7 min read
Using AI to Explore Unfamiliar Codebases
How to use AI coding assistants as a guide when navigating code you didn't write — from getting an architectural overview to tracing execution paths.
Josh
Articles
Page 2 of 3
Tooling 6 min read
Refactoring with AI: A Step-by-Step Strategy for Modernizing Legacy Code
How to use AI coding assistants for safe, incremental refactoring — scoping the work, writing safety tests, reviewing generated diffs, and avoiding common pitfalls.
Josh
Agents 7 min read
MCP Servers: Giving Your AI Coding Agent Real Tools
How to extend your AI coding assistant with Model Context Protocol servers — connecting it to your database, APIs, and custom tools in about ten minutes.
Josh
Production 7 min read
Writing Tests with AI: Getting Edge Cases, Not Just Coverage
How to prompt AI coding assistants to generate tests that actually catch bugs — edge cases, failure modes, and boundary conditions, not just happy-path boilerplate.
Josh
Tooling 7 min read
Managing Context in Long AI Coding Sessions
How to keep AI coding assistants accurate across a long feature branch — when to trim, reset, and summarize context so the model stays focused.
Josh
Tooling 6 min read
Debugging with LLMs: Give the Model What It Can't Guess
How to structure debugging sessions with an AI assistant — what runtime context to share, how to frame the problem, and how to verify a diagnosis before patching.
Josh
Production 6 min read
Evaluating AI-Generated Code Before It Ships
A practical checklist for reviewing AI-written code — catching hallucinated APIs, subtle logic bugs, and security gaps before they reach production.
Josh
Prompt Engineering 3 min read
Prompt Engineering Patterns That Survive Production
Five battle-tested prompting patterns — structure, examples, decomposition, self-checking, and output contracts — that hold up when real traffic hits.
Josh
RAG 3 min read
RAG vs Fine-Tuning: How to Actually Choose
A practical decision framework for when to reach for retrieval-augmented generation, when to fine-tune, and when to do neither — with the trade-offs that matter.
Josh