My workflow for building side projects and work tools with AI coding agents that actually survive past the first month. Covers model choices (Claude Opus, Codex, Qwen), a docs-first approach (PITCH/ARCHITECTURE/IMPLEMENTATION), guardrails, context management via slash commands, and what I stopped using (MCP servers, multi-agent teams, instruction files). Includes dogfooding results — what shipped and what broke.

the docs-first approach is the part most people skip everyone wants to jump straight to prompting but without a PITCH.md or equivalent, the agent has no north star and you spend half your time correcting drift instead of building the context save/restore slash commands are underrated too losing context mid-session and having to re-explain the whole codebase is where most of my time used to go.