Don't worry we'll all be taking the Claude certification courses soon enough

Ah - I know! Seriously I know. There's such a bad need for this right now. The problem is that the folks who are great at agentic coding are coding their asses off 16 to 20 hours a day and don't have a minute they want to spend on writing guides because of the opportunity cost.

One of the rare resources I found recently was the OpenClaw guys interview on Lex. He drops a few bangers that are really valuable and will save you having to spend a long time figuring it out.

Also there's a very strong disincentive for anyone to write right now because we're competing against the noise and the slop in the space. So best to just shut the fuck up and create as fast as we can, and let the outcome speak for itself. You're going to see a lot more products like OpenClaw where the pace of innovation is rapid, and the author freely admits that they're coding agentically and not writing a single line.

I think the advantage that Peter has (openclaw author) is that he has enough money and success to not give a fuck about what people say re him writing purely agentically, so he's been very open about it which has been great for others who are considering doing the same.

But if you have a software engineering career or are a public figure with something to lose, you tend to STFU if you're doing pure agentic coding on a project.

But that'll change. Probably over the next few months. OpenClaw broke the ice.

Here’s some practical tips:

Start small. Figure out what it (whatever tool you’re using) can do reliably at a quality level you’re comfortable with. Try other tools. There are tons. If it doesn’t get it right with the first prompt, iterate. Refine. Keep at it until you get there.

When you have seen some pattern work, do that a bunch. It won’t always work. Write rules / prompts / skills to try to get it to avoid making the mistakes you see. Keep doing this for a while and you’ll get into a groove.

Then try taking on bigger chunks of work at a time. Break apart a problem the same way you’d do it yourself first. Write a framework first. Build hello world. Write tests. Build the happy path. Add features. Don’t forget to make it write lots of tests. And run them. It’ll be lazy if you let it, so don’t let it. Each architectural step is not just a single prompt but a conversation with the output being a commit or a PR.

Also, use specs or plans heavily. Have a conversation with it about what you’re trying to do and different ways to do it. Their bias is to just code first and ask questions later. Fight that. Make it write a spec doc first and read it carefully. Tell it “don’t code anything but first ask me clarifying questions about the problem.” Works wonders.

As for convincing the AI haters they’re wrong? I seriously do. Not. Care. They’ll catch up. Or be out of a job. Not my problem.