I wrote down everything I know about building with AI

Adam Ridgway posted his one-year milestone for Forgeworks Labs this week and thanked me in it. I had not asked.

What I wrote back is what I keep coming round to:

The year taught me that the interesting part is rarely the AI itself, it is working out the ways of working with it.

I have spent the last stretch studying for the Claude Architect Foundations Certification. The study turned out to be the occasion rather than the point. What it actually did was make me go back over how I think about this work now, and more usefully, how that has changed the way I do it.

So I did it the slow way. Rather than reading notes and hoping they stuck, I worked through every point one at a time and wrote each one out in my own words. If I could not say it plainly, I did not know it yet. That took a while and it caught a lot of things I thought I understood.

The review is finished, and it is all public

It is at vibe2value.com/for-developers, organised by what you are actually doing rather than by any syllabus. The agent loop, and why the loop is your code and not the model’s. Why more tools make an agent worse rather than better. What a gate should actually check, which is what happened rather than what the model says happened. Why a search that comes back short is more dangerous than one that fails outright.

None of it is theory I collected. It is the year with Adam, and the work before that, written down in a form I can hand to someone.

The part that surprised me is how much of it turned out to be about ways of working rather than about the technology. What you set up before you start. How you cut the job up. What you check before you believe it. What you write down so tomorrow is not a fresh start. None of that comes out of the compiler, and none of it is a knack you either have or you do not. They are practices, which means you can pick them up this week.

What is next

There are six worked scenarios to go through, taking all of this off the page and into something running. That is the real test, because knowing a thing and using it under pressure are different skills. More about that soon.

Adam is into year two now and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes. The tools keep moving and the ways of working with them keep moving too, so what I have written down is where I have got to rather than a settled answer.

I have been doing this a long time and I am still learning, which is rather the point. If any of it is useful to you, take it.

If you would rather talk than read, email me at matt@vibe2value.com and say what you are stuck on.