Skills you'll gain
10- Diagnose when to leave autocomplete for an agent loopWorking
Use the 3-signal test (ticket length, cross-file edits, test surface) to pick autocomplete vs agent before opening the IDE — and quote the cost difference.
- Author project rules (CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / cursor.rules)Production
Write rules that survive 8-hour sessions: build commands, conventions, DO/DO-NOT lists, gotchas, hook config — distilled from your bug history, not copied from a template.
- Run plan-then-edit reliably across agent CLIsWorking
Use plan mode in Claude Code, plan-as-edit in Cursor, plan-files in Aider, PRD generation in Devin — recognise when to skip plan and when it's mandatory.
- Drive a TDD-with-agent loop that convergesProduction
Red-green-refactor in agent loop: failing test as input, agent edits until green, agent stops at green. Includes the 'one bug = one regression test' commit rule.
- Dispatch parallel sub-agents for read-only researchProduction
Spawn N independent Explore agents on non-overlapping queries; aggregate results back to a primary agent. Cost math: 4× tokens parallel often beats 4× sequential time at the team level.
- Wire MCP servers (Linear, Sentry, Postgres, custom) into agentsWorking
Install standard MCP servers, write a custom one in <30 lines with FastMCP, scope read-only vs read-write, pair it with a permission boundary.
- Configure agent hooks for lint / type / secrets enforcementProduction
Pre-tool-use, post-edit, post-stop hooks that catch unwanted edits BEFORE they ship. Hooks beat prompts because they don't depend on the model remembering.
- Ship PR-review automation with auto-fix loopsProduction
CodeRabbit / Greptile / self-hosted reviewer + agent that consumes the review, fixes, re-runs tests. The 'no human-in-loop until tests pass' pattern.
- Track $-per-merged-PR and route work by itProduction
Helicone / OpenAI dashboard / Anthropic Console + Slack digest of weekly $/PR by team. Use it to settle 'which agent / which model / which mode' debates with data.
- Operate AI-native dev under SOC 2 / GDPR / regulated constraintsAdvanced
Permission models, audit logs, secrets scanning preflight, sandboxed exec, allow-listed shell — the rollout shape regulated industries actually buy.