Lectures

Tony gives Tommy a tiny fix in someone else's partner zone — and Tommy gets his first real taste of what it's like to open a file where you understand nothing, while the agent "while at it" neatened half the file.

Oliver explains to Tommy that a task has not only the "what to do" part, but also the "how far you are allowed to go" — scope, the boundary, the forbidden block in the spec. And that is the same craft as writing tasks for juniors.

Alex explains: you read your own code from memory, someone else's does not. When editing, the object of reading is not the whole file, but the diff. And every change gets sorted into three boxes: unnecessary, dangerous, unexpected.

Alex shows the tools: /diff as a quality gate, /rewind for rewinding the whole run, three trust modes (manual / acceptEdits / plan mode), and pinpoint permission rules in settings.json.

Tommy assembles the fix from scratch and on his own: a clean branch, manual mode, a narrow task with a forbidden block, breaking down the diff by buckets, rolling back a sprawling run, rules in settings.json — and a one-line commit to main.

One article for this level: why allow, ask and deny rules matter when one permission mode covers the whole session, how to read a rule for files and commands, and how to clean up settings.local.json.