How I Navigate Agentic Coding — slides

How I Navigate Agentic Coding

as a Junior Software Engineer in a Startup

Yong Kheng Beh

Software Engineer, Vocare

Volunteer, Infoxchange (SAcommunity.org)

Emerging Professionals Committee, ACS SA

Qualified medical doctor

Overview

  1. 01My Honest Feelings with Claude Code
  2. 02My Workflow
  3. 03My Claude Code Side Project

My Honest Feelings with Claude Code

A crowd cheering with fists raised in the air — elation. A dog peering warily over the edge of a table — apprehension.

Do I Trust AI?

Partially

How do I check AI work?

Use AI

My Workflow

  1. Problem/
    Goal
  2. Research
  3. Brainstorm
  4. Implement
  5. Test
  6. Pull Request Review
  7. Fix
  8. Ship

Audits

  • Security audits
  • Test-suite audits
  • Cleanup
  • ARCHITECTURE.md
knip.dev
QR code linking to knip.dev

Tools

github.com/obra/superpowers
QR code linking to github.com/obra/superpowers

Claude Built-in Commands

  • /deep-research
  • /schedule
  • workflow
  • ultrathink
The same kitchen, spotless: bare white counters, an empty island, stools tucked in and nothing left out. What the messy kitchen becomes after the cleanup. A photograph of a kitchen in disarray: dirty pans, stacked plates, spilled food across the counter and floor, a keyboard among the mess, and sticky notes on the fridge reading 'Refactor' and 'Cleanup later'. A visual metaphor for a codebase after shipping without cleaning up.

Human in the Loop

  • Check the database directly
  • Roughly read the diff
  • Manual user testing

Keep Learning

  • If AI mentioned something unfamiliar: ask it to explain more and why is it needed.
  • Continue to study software engineering fundamentals: You don't know what you don't know.
  • Always be curious

Uncle Bob Martin

@unclebobmartin · Jul 23

Replying to @ori_pomerantz

I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.

My Current Side Project with Claude Code

The current SAcommunity.org website: a dense, yellow-and-white community directory homepage with a top search bar, a video panel, a newsletter sign-up box and a long list of category links — a dated, text-heavy design.

Sacommunity.org

  • Legacy website (>10 years)
  • >14,000 listings, >1,000 articles
  • Requirements:
    • Migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 11
    • Fix current website's pain points

Data Migration

Problems

Solutions

A heavily customised CiviCRM inside Drupal 6 Difficult to locate the data
Found where the data lived successfully extracted the data needed
Slow SQL extraction
Extraction time shortened from days to less than a minute
Scattered migration process: separate SQL, PHP and Python scripts
Streamlined the pipeline into one recoverable process

WIP

  • UI/UX design
    • Information Architecture
    • Responsive Website
    • Page Designs for Different Content Types (Listings, articles, events, venue hire)
    • Accessibility
  • Search
  • Fix pain points
The redesigned SAcommunity.org site on desktop: a clean pale-blue hero with a large search bar for finding organisations, services and topics, quick links for Emergency Help, Housing, Mental Health, Food Relief and Counselling, and partner logos below. The redesigned SAcommunity.org site on mobile: the same search-first layout in a dark navy header with a hamburger menu, condensed to a single column for a phone screen.

Conclusion

  • Problem solve with Claude Code with many guardrails around it.
  • Be clear of what you want out of Claude Code.
  • Communicate clearly, be specific with your prompt.
  • Instead of checking the code, check the result and output.
  • Keep things organised and clean up regularly.

Thank You

kheng2023.github.io/how-i-navigate-agentic-coding