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The AI Developer's Field Guide: Classes, Monsters, and Anti-Patterns in AI Coding
Paperback
Series: The Slop Codex, Book 1
Publisher: Discursive
Published: Sep 11 2026
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.38 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
The tests pass. Nobody understands the change.
AI can write the next thousand lines of code. Your team still has to review them, maintain them, and decide whether they belong in production.
The AI Developer's Field Guide is an illustrated guide for developers, engineering managers, and technical leads who want to recognize the habits that turn fast AI output into expensive maintenance.
Recognize the pattern. Ask a better question. Choose a countermove.
- Review with judgment: recognize overconfident merging, fragile fixes, ornamental architecture, and misplaced trust in automation.
- Name what is going wrong: use memorable developer archetypes and software monsters to discuss failures that are otherwise hard to pin down.
- Turn recognition into action: work through review questions and practical interventions that clarify who should act, what to ask, and which habit needs to change.
- Bring the conversation to your team: use a shared vocabulary in code reviews, planning meetings, and retrospectives when plausible output is outrunning understanding.
Your codebase has monsters. Now they have names.
Meet the Scope Creep Kraken, the Phantom Intern, the Probability Pixie, and other creatures of AI-assisted development. Alongside the Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, and Cleric, they make familiar engineering behaviors easier to recognize and discuss. The role-playing language gives serious software problems a memorable shape. No tabletop gaming experience is required.
Start here: Volume I of The Slop Codex. This second edition addresses agentic coding workflows, connected tools, persistent context, AI code review, agent boundaries, and version-aware context. The focus stays on the human decisions that determine whether generated code becomes useful software.
For the developer staring at a suspicious pull request-and the engineering lead trying to make that conversation productive.
Previously published as The AI Developer's Field Guide: Classes, Monsters, and Anti-Patterns in AI Coding by Timothy O'Brien.
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