A practical guide to working effectively with AI coding assistants
(chat interfaces, in-editor extensions, agentic tools) for engineers
and scientists solving problems with code rather than building
production software.
Seven sections:
- 01-three-modes: web chat vs in-editor vs agentic, with heuristics
for choosing and a framing of chat as natural-language programming.
- 02-errors-and-logs: the canonical copy-paste case; framing the
paste for useful answers.
- 03-in-editor-workflow: autocomplete, inline edit, side panel,
quick actions; habits that survive tool changes.
- 04-conversations: multi-turn discussions, context-window
awareness, opening well, prompt iteration, when to start fresh.
- 05-agentic-workflow: variations on the basic loop (sub-agents,
plan mode, async, MCP, sandboxing); briefing, supervision,
damage control, cost and energy.
- 06-verifying-and-citing: hallucinations and silent errors;
privacy framed against the cloud-services baseline; proportional
disclosure norms.
- 07-local-models: local models as a cross-cutting alternative
across all three modes; hardware tiers, tool support,
capability gap.
Tool-agnostic where possible; current tool examples are
illustrative and expected to date.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
