AI coding assistants became game-changers this year, but harnessing them effectively takes skill and structure. These tools dramatically increased what LLMs can do for real-world coding, and many developers (myself included) embraced them.

At Anthropic, for example, engineers adopted Claude Code so heavily that today ~90% of the code for Claude Code is written by Claude Code itself. Yet, using LLMs for programming is not a push-button magic experience — it’s “difficult and unintuitive” and gettin...