The Production AI Coding Engineer: Build, Test, Secure, and Ship Reliable Software with AI Coding Agents

Your AI agent can write a feature in minutes. Someone still has to make sure it survives production. AI coding agents write working code at astonishing speed. They also write bugs, security holes and wrong answers at the same speed, with the same calm confidence. The Production AI Coding Engineer teaches you to be the person who decides what to build, checks that it works, keeps it safe and puts it in front of real users. This is not a book about building agents, and it is not a guide to one tool. Whether you use Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex or whatever comes next, you will learn the habits that outlast tools. You need no production experience: if you can write a small Python function and read a little JavaScript, you are ready. Every term is explained the first time it appears. You will learn how to: Write specs an agent cannot misread Work in small, verified steps instead of giant, risky changes Review AI-written code like a senior engineer and keep the codebase yours Test first, and write tests that catch what agents break Make continuous integration the gatekeeper for every change Spot the risks in AI-generated code, and control secrets, permissions and blast radius Automate security checks Ship safely, observe your system and handle incidents with confidence Learn by shipping a real service. Across 16 chapters you will build on Lendly, the small loan desk of a community library, adding features the way you would with an agent: write the brief, take small steps, review, test, gate, secure and ship. Its starting code is short, uses only Python's standard library and is printed in full in the appendix, along with ready-to-use checklists, a glossary and further reading. If you have ever watched an agent write a thousand lines in a minute and wondered who would be on call for them, this book is for you.