The AI Developer's Field Guide: NPCs, Monsters, and Anti-Patterns at Scale

by Timothy O'Brien

The AI demo worked. Now the organization has to live with it.

Who owns an agent's mistakes? Who pays for the tokens? And why does every vendor's roadmap end with your team doing the integration?

The AI Developer's Field Guide — Volume 2 explores what happens when AI adoption spreads beyond individual developers into budgets, architecture, procurement, security, and executive decisions. Timothy O'Brien turns familiar organizational dysfunction into an illustrated bestiary of NPCs, monsters, and anti-patterns, giving technical teams a shared vocabulary for problems that are easy to recognize and difficult to discuss.

Meet the Dashboard Necromancer, Vendor Bard, Compliance Oracle, and Warlock of Staff Reduction. Then confront four larger the Cost Singularity, the Infinite Backlog Engine, the Autonomy Mirage, and the Compliance Black Hole.
Behind the fantasy names are practical questions about ownership, incentives, evidence, and control. The book's twenty countermoves help teams make costs visible, test vendor claims, define useful outcomes, set boundaries for agents, and keep people accountable for consequential decisions.

Written for developers, engineering managers, architects, and technical leaders, this second volume of The Slop Codex combines satire with field-guide reference material. It connects the promises of automation to the work of making it dependable across an organization.

Use it to name the pattern in the meeting, ask the question missing from the proposal, and choose a countermove before the next pilot becomes everyone's problem.

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 13, 2026

About the author

Timothy O'Brien writes fiction and nonfiction about technology, work, systems, and the strange human realities emerging around artificial intelligence. Their books include the novels Into Alignment and Redundant, the Slop Codex volumes, and Orchestrator: A Field Guide to Delegated Intelligence. Across genres, they explore power, automation, institutional life, and how people retain agency in a world increasingly shaped by machines.