First edition — 2026
A practical handbook for the Claude Code era.
A field manual for engineering leaders who have to ship real software with AI agents — without making the codebase, the org, or the budget worse.
Most published guidance on AI-assisted coding is either vendor marketing or doom-mongering from people who haven't opened a terminal in a decade. This handbook is neither.
It's an operating manual for engineering leaders running real codebases through Claude Code and the tools that will replace it next quarter. It covers the patterns that work — legible repos, deterministic hooks, scoped PRs, explicit autonomy levels — the failure modes that keep recurring — AI slop, prompt injection, runaway token bills — and the conversations you have to have with your CEO, your board, and your security team.
Anchored on Claude Code, but the principles port to whatever ships next.
Eight chapter highlights — not a comprehensive list.
The seven canonical signatures of AI-generated code that passes review and breaks production: mocked-implementation tests, deleted edge cases, silent error swallowing, weakened validation, removed security checks, gratuitous abstractions, diff bloat.
Why the harness, not the model, is what keeps an agent from doing the wrong thing — and how to wire hooks that block dangerous actions before the LLM can rationalize them.
The line item your CFO has not yet found, with the math on why "we'll just use Opus everywhere" turns into a six-figure surprise.
A graduated framework for what an agent is allowed to do unsupervised, supervised, or never — so "AI autonomy" stops being a vibe and becomes a policy.
Why every major 2025–2026 agent incident has the same root cause — and how to architect around it.
The questions to actually ask AI vendors, the answers you can write yourself, and which contractual terms are non-negotiable.
Week-by-week rollout for a mid-size org, from baseline measurement through CLAUDE.md adoption to measurable PR-throughput gains.
The four-slide deck, the talking points, and the specific pushbacks for when leadership demands a 50% headcount cut by Q4.
Every artifact referenced in the book — CLAUDE.md templates, hooks, skills, the 90-day plan, the AI Code Smell checklist, the postmortem template, the autonomy ladder, the executive kit — lives in the open-source companion repo.
Join the waitlist for launch notification, sample chapters, and the companion starter kit — CLAUDE.md templates, hooks, and the 90-day rollout plan.
Or email ryan@codingwithaibook.com directly.