The senior engineer's guide to AI coding: Context loading, custom hooks, and automation

There are people out there definitely like me, that really want to know the advanced techniques that can leverage the most powerful parts of these AI-powered coding tools. Where do you want us to get started that you think many people don't think about in terms of how they can use these tools?

Context and diagrams is a great place to start. They're definitely the best way to get AI to do what you want. So they have what are called Mermaid diagrams. This is a way of visualizing database operations, and it's a way of essentially compressing your application down into very small lines of text that show how your application works. Now, for a human to read this, this is a big challenge, but an AI can consume this easily. I could even just say, "Please explain the authentication flow," and because it already has it in the context, it's not gonna have to do a bunch of file reads and code-based exploration to figure this out. It's gonna come up with the results much quicker.

If I gave you infinite junior-to-mid-career talent, who is always available, who would do the work you would do if you had unlimited amount of time and no meetings, what would you do when a ticket came in? Like, what would you do? [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have John Lindquist at egghead.io, who is a superuser of AI-powered engineering tools like Cursor and Claude Code. Now, I love all you non-technical folks out there, but this is an episode for the senior software engineers who really want to understand how they can use the power features of some of these AI engineering tools to really both optimize the quality of code that they're generating, but also become more efficient as they use their IDE, terminal, and AI assistants to write, check, and deploy code. This is a great episode for any of our advanced users out there, VPs of engineering, CTO, pay attention, send this to your staff engineers. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch: these tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs, and for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale upmarket faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. John, welcome to How I AI. I have to put some context here, which is we have done quite a bit of coding with Cursor, vibe coding episodes, but a lot of what our audience has asked for is early maturity, less technical introductions to these tools. But there are people out there definitely like me, um, and definitely like folks that follow you, that really do know how to write great software and want to, you know, as people say, "Of course, I'm a 9X engineer, but how do I become a 10X engineer?" [chuckles] With some of these tools, want to know really the advanced techniques that can leverage the most powerful parts of these AI-powered coding tools and get you really high-quality software. So I'm really excited about what you're going to show us today. And so, where do you want us to get started that you think many people don't think about in terms of how they can use these tools?