Working Effectively with AI Coding Agents

AI coding agents are increasingly part of day-to-day development, but it's easy to misuse them, simply but not using their features effectively. In this session we’ll give hands on advice on how to use agent context, when to use reasoning depth levels, concrete techniques for managing agent behavior, through context structuring, compaction strategies, sub-agent usage, commands, and hooks.

We’ll share how popular agents, Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex use these techniques, highlighting meaningful differences in strengths, and limitations. By the end of the session, you’ll have a clearer mental model of how these agents behave, when they are effective, and real takeaways you'll use every day in your agentic development workflows.