About

About the author

Tim O'Brien has spent decades building and shipping software systems — from late-1990s startups through Forbes.com and large-scale engineering organizations. His work has spanned distributed systems, open-source infrastructure, engineering leadership, and the human behavior that surrounds all of it.

He has been writing about technology, culture, and the space between them for more than twenty years. The AI Developer's Field Guide is the result of watching, working with, and managing teams as AI-assisted coding moved from curiosity to default — and noticing the failure modes nobody had names for yet.

He publishes under the imprint Discursive.

The book

The AI Developer's Field Guide is a practical field manual for developers, engineering managers, and technical leaders. It maps the behavioral archetypes and technical anti-patterns that emerge when individual developers and small teams adopt AI coding tools — and gives teams a shared vocabulary, review prompts, and interventions for code reviews, retros, and planning.

It is built to be used, not just read. Use it to:

• Run a sharper retro after a sprint that quietly went sideways.
• Review AI-generated code without rebuilding the review process from scratch.
• Have the awkward conversation about a teammate's coding habits without making it personal.
• Decide where to put humans back in the loop on purpose.

Why 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.