Expanding Your Craft

Understanding AI-Assisted Development

Learn the skills and workflows you and your team need to build faster and better with AI, while avoiding its many dangers.

New Course

Guide, Judge, and Correct AI-Generated Code

The software development industry always changes. But nothing compares to what’s happening right now with AI-assisted development.

There a lot of AI users now who copy prompts and hope for the best. There are also worried devs, who keep hearing that AI will replace them or that they’ll lose their skills if they lean on it too much.

A proper view of AI is that it isn’t a replacement for understanding. It’s a tool that amplifies it. But it can also amplify you and your team’s worst qualities.

The real skill isn’t using AI. It’s knowing how to think with it.

This course does not teach you the latest AI tool, because by next month there’ll be a new one. Instead, I want to build something more permanent in your mind: a framework for understanding how large language models actually work, so you can then follow workflows and best practices that are strategic, reliable, and yours.

This course will teach you and your team how to successfully integrate LLMs across your entire software development lifecycle.

What Makes This Different

Most AI courses focus on prompts. Copy this, paste that, hope it works. But that’s not how the best AI-assisted developers operate. You need to understand the underlying principles, the same way understanding JavaScript’s execution context makes you better at debugging, or knowing how React’s reconciliation works helps you write more performant components.

This course goes under the hood, hype-free. We’ll explore the math and linguistics that make LLMs tick. You’ll learn about vector spaces, attention mechanisms, and why models confabulate (what people incorrectly call “hallucinations”). We’ll look at context engineering, not just prompt engineering, because managing what the model “knows” is more important than how you ask.

And yes, we’ll cover practical workflows: planning, implementation, debugging, code reviews. But you’ll understand why these workflows work, which means you can adapt them as tools change.

This Is For You If…

You’re a beginner who wants to use AI without feeling like you’re cheating yourself out of learning. You’ll discover how to leverage AI while still building the mental models that make you valuable as a developer.

You’re an experienced developer who wants to integrate AI into your workflow (or your team’s) without sacrificing code quality. You’ll learn where AI excels, where it fails, and how to structure your development process to get consistent, maintainable results.

You’re worried about becoming dependent on AI or losing your edge. I address this directly. I’ll show you how to use AI as a force multiplier for your expertise, not a crutch that weakens it, and how to avoid both the personal and professional pitfalls of AI-assisted development.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end, you’ll have a durable mental model of how LLMs work. You’ll know how to engineer context and prompts strategically. You’ll understand human-AI collaboration patterns that actually work in production codebases.

Most importantly, you’ll stop feeling uncertain. You’ll approach AI tools with clarity, purpose, and the confidence that comes from genuine understanding.

Because at the end of the day, the developers who thrive aren’t the ones who found the best prompts. They’re the ones who understand what they’re doing.

In the age of AI it’s even more important to not imitate, but understand.

Watch the First Hour for Free

Not sure if this course is for you or your team? Watch the first hour for free, where we establish the mental model that we use throughout the rest of the course!

Curriculum

Introduction
Setup
A Proper Mental Model of LLMs
Large Language Models and Grammar
Conceptual Aside: Vectors
Attention and Attending
Conceptual Aside: Determinism vs Non-Determinism
Determinism and the Digital Age
Conceptual Aside: Programming Language Grammar
Prediction and Statistics
Confabulation and Unreliability
Conceptual Aside: Reasoning Models
Conceptual Aside: Agents
You Aren't Having a Conversation (and the Dangers of Anthropomorphization)
Context Engineering and Management
Pattern Matching and Navigating the Embedding Space
Is It Engineering?
Project Context
Technical Context
Context Refresh and Drift
Immediate Context
Task Context
Clean Human Code
Agents and Context
Prompt Engineering
The Anatomy of Effective Prompts
Decomposition
Roles and Personas
Specificity and Constraints
Examples of Expected Behavior
Session Context
Code Generation Workflows: Planning
Brainstorming
Business Rules and Constraints
Documentation and Spec
Implementation Planning
Agent Skills Modules
The Context Problem
Conceptual Aside: Context Window
Window Size
Conceptual Aside: System Prompt
Context Rot
Conceptual Aside: Markdown
Skills
The Anatomy of a Skill
Frontmatter
Instructions
Scripts
Assets
How Agents Integrate Skills
Conceptual Aside: Progressive Disclosure
Discover
Load Metadata
Match Tasks to Skills
Activate
Execute and Access
Skills In Action
Skill Authoring
Metadata
Good Context
Domain Expertise
New Capabilities
Good Context: An Open Source Education
Repeatable Workflows
Interoperability
Finding Pre-Existing Skills
Skills Project
Create a Skill
Code Generation Workflows: Implementation
Task Decomposition
Pseudocode
Code Constraints (Types, Tests, and Patterns)
Context Engineering
Prompt Engineering
Code Generation Workflows: Integration
Human-In-The-Loop
AI-Assisted Debugging
Iterative Refinement and Not Breaking What's Working
Team Collaboration: When AI is a Team Member
Quality Control
Established Patterns
Explainability
Systems Integration
Edge Cases
Performance
Code Reviews
AI Pitfalls and How to Manage Them
Hallucinations
A Lack of Training Data (i.e. New Things)
The Echo Chamber Effect and Sycophancy
Cognitive Load
A Stranger to Your Codebase
Maintainability
Context Switching
Cognitive Laziness and Maintaining Your Skill
Losing The Joy of Coding
Don't Imitate, Understand
Practical Tooling
IDEs and Completions
Conversations
Agents and Iteration
Hype and Selecting Tools
Capstone Project
Plan
Implement
Integrate
Quality Control
Conclusion

Ready to enroll?

Start learning today and unlock your potential.

Don't Imitate Understand by Tony Alicea. Courses, coaching, and more to grow you from beginner to dev to lead to architect and beyond in the age of AI-assisted software development.

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