About

The Book

The AI Developer's Field Guide maps the behavioral archetypes and technical anti-patterns that emerge when individual developers and small teams adopt AI coding tools — the characters, monsters, and interventions that help software teams spot trouble early and build better habits.

The Author

Tim O'Brien is a software engineer and writer who has been building things on the internet since the late '90s. He has worked at organizations ranging from startups to Forbes.com, and he has been writing about technology, culture, and the space between them for over two decades. He publishes under the imprint Discursive.

The Framework

The field guide uses a tabletop-RPG-inspired framework because it works. Anti-patterns are easier to remember when they have names and faces. The Fighter is more memorable than "overconfident developer with action bias." The Scope Creep Kraken is funnier than "uncontrolled feature expansion driven by AI-assisted prototyping." The names are designed to survive a standup meeting.

The framework is inspired by the anti-patterns tradition in software engineering — specifically, the 1998 book AntiPatterns by Brown, Malveau, McCormick, and Mowbray, which named the bad solutions so teams could recognize them. This book does the same thing for AI-assisted coding.

Disclaimer

This book uses a fantasy-RPG-inspired framework for its organizational structure and terminology. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any specific tabletop role-playing game, publisher, or brand. All character archetypes, monsters, and NPCs are original creations.