Senior Engineers' AI Coding Workflow: 5 Core Skills to Keep Agents in Control
tomcrawshaw01 · x · 2026-08-06
When using AI for coding, senior engineers' advantage lies not in writing better prompts, but in relying on a systematic workflow. This process consists of five core skills:
- Brainstorming: Before any building starts, the AI is forced to interview the user to clarify actual requirements, refusing to develop until the user signs off.
- Writing plans: Translating agreed requirements into highly detailed documents that anyone without context can follow.
- Subagent driven development: Assigning a fresh agent to each specific task and reviewing after completion to prevent long-context forgetting.
- Verification before completion: Setting a strict gate where the AI must run checks and show the output before it can claim to be done.
- Systematic debugging: When things break, the AI must find the actual root cause before changing anything; patching the error message directly counts as a failure.
The author notes that all five capabilities can be enabled via a free plugin installed with a single line: superpowers@claude-plugins-official.
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