LEMON AGENT

lime The field manual · 10 patterns

Working with Coding Agents

Concrete patterns that survive real use: what to watch out for, and the habits worth building. Written for humans to adopt one step at a time; every step ends with an optional prompt that helps you apply it in your own environment.

Distilled from one practitioner's measured usage: logged sessions, the incidents that recurred, and the patterns that stopped them. v0. Step slugs are stable; chapters may be cut or reordered before 1.0.

The steps

Ordered by leverage-per-effort, but every step stands alone: start where it hurts. In a hurry, step 0 is the baseline in one paste.

1. 00 The one-paste baseline

   Optional baseline: durable project instructions, verification gates, and reusable review skills, set up one confirmed change at a time.

2. 01 Make each correction stick

   Turn corrections from one conversation into short project instructions and reusable skills that future agent sessions can follow.

3. 02 Prove it before and after

   Show the failure before the fix, run a cheap focused check before an expensive one, and deliver the artifact instead of a claim.

4. 03 Make the agent interview you

   Use a short design conversation to expose open decisions and approve the approach before the first edit.

5. 04 Reviews that try to kill the work

   Ask independent reviewers to find specific ways the work could fail, then verify each finding before changing the code.

6. 05 Fan out, then funnel

   Split large work across agents only when each part writes durable results and a final pass verifies and combines them.

7. 06 Choose the right tool surface

   Use a CLI for local work, an API for direct service access, and MCP when a standard agent connection adds real value.

8. 07 Build lots of small tools

   Turn repeated mechanical work into small deterministic tools, so the agent can spend its effort on decisions, orchestration, and glue.

9. 08 Views on demand, not apps

   Keep the data in structured files and generate a self-contained HTML view when a person needs to inspect it.

10. 09 Turn checkable rules into checks

    Keep judgment in prose, but turn mechanical rules into advisory hooks and scripts that run when they matter.

Check your work against

The guide's watch-out half lives in two numbered failure lists; every "watch out" above cites them by id: The Prose Failure List (PF-01…24, taste) · The Agent Workflow Failure List (AF-01…20, verification).

← The field manual · for agents: raw chapters at /guides/coding-agents/*.md