Effective AI-Assisted Coding with Eleanor Berger and Isaac Flath
Isaac Flath and Eleanor Berger on what actually changes when you bring AI into your development process.
The conversation around AI and coding has been dominated by two extremes: either AI will replace developers, or it's just a fancy autocomplete. The reality is far more interesting. AI can genuinely amplify what good developers do: but only if they know how to work with it.
Isaac and Eleanor have spent the last few years building with AI and teaching others to do the same. Their focus isn't on prompts or tools. It's on the fundamentals: how to think about a problem clearly enough that AI can help solve it, how to set up your environment so you're not fighting the tool, how to evaluate what comes back and iterate when it's not right.
In this livestreamed episode of Vanishing Gradients, Eleanor and Isaac join Hugo Bowne-Anderson to talk about how to work effectively with AI Agents and Assistants when building software.
What We'll Cover:
• Specification as Foundation: Why knowing what you want before you start matters more than the tool you're using. How this changes your entire approach.
• Context Engineering: Building the information environment that lets AI understand your code, your patterns, your constraints. What this looks like in practice.
• Evaluation and Judgment: How to think critically about what AI produces. When it's good, when it's not, and why. What separates useful output from plausible-sounding garbage.
• Learning Systematically: How to analyze failures and use them to improve. What patterns tell you about your workflow and your thinking.
• Scaling Beyond Solo Development: How this works in teams, in CI/CD, in production systems. Where the theory meets reality and what actually works.
• Agentic Workflows: The emerging possibility of AI agents working more autonomously toward goals. What changes about how you think about the problem.
For developers who want to understand what's actually possible with AI, and how to build systems that work.
Register to join live or get the recording afterwards.