Resources

The Modern Software Developer is a Stanford course (CS146S) that covers most of what you need to know about agentic coding — prompting techniques, AI IDEs, patterns, and more. Why it’s worth it I highly recommend this course: it covers the foundations you need, from the ground up. It starts by introducing LLMs and different prompting strategies — K-shot, chain-of-thought, self-critique, and others — before moving on to the tooling and patterns of agentic coding. ...

These are the notes from talks at Y Combinator. General rule of thumb The best technique is to do what a professional software engineer already does. Small code, modularity, and abstraction are your friends — they help both you and the LLM reason about the project. Note: this advice will likely shift over the next few months. As models get more capable, some of these guardrails will loosen. Plan before you build Don’t ask the model to one-shot the whole project. Instead, create a planning file (a CLAUDE.md or a plain markdown file) that lays out step by step what you want to build. Iterate on it over time and revise it whenever your understanding changes. You can even use a Planner agent to help revise it. ...