Live Interactive Workshop

Professional AI Dev Setup, v2

September 1, 2026 - 9:30am to 4:30pm Central Daylight Time

Move beyond ad hoc prompting and learn how to design AI coding workflows that are reusable, reviewable, and safe. Build project instructions, skills, hooks, subagents, and automation recipes you can carry across tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.

Professional AI Dev Setup, v2
Meet Your Instructor

Build Repeatable, Reviewable AI Workflows

Steve is the front-end architect at Temporal. Previously, he was the front-end architect at Twilio and SendGrid. He is the director emeritus and founder of the front-end engineering program at the Turing School for Software and Design in Denver, Colorado — a non-profit developer training program. In a previous life, Steve was a New York City public school teacher. He taught special education and web development in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado

Skills, Hooks, Subagents, and Automation Recipes for Real AI Coding Workflows

A professional and productive AI coding environment mean encoding the things you keep re-explaining into a repeatable system. This hands-on, lab-driven workshop teaches the shared primitives that Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor have all converged on: project instructions, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, and sandbox/approval policy.

Each section introduces one primitive and immediately turns it into a working recipe built in your own editor, culminating in a capstone that chains everything into one end-to-end feature workflow. You will leave with a transferable craft for professional AI-assisted development, not a vendor-specific bag of tricks.

What You Will Master

The Senior Engineer Toolkit
  • Separate the seven core primitives—instructions, scoped rules, skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, and sandbox/approval policy—and know what belongs where.
  • Design an instruction architecture across CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, project rules, user rules, and team config without creating an unreadable AI bible.
  • Write strong skills as reusable runbooks with clear context, steps, and expected output.
  • Use progressive disclosure and context budgeting so agents load detailed guidance only when it is relevant.
  • Install hooks as deterministic guardrails for formatting, protected files, validation, and session setup so safety does not depend on the model remembering.
  • Use subagents for context isolation and parallel specialized work that returns concise summaries instead of raw logs.
  • Connect MCP tools for external context while reasoning clearly about credentials, blast radius, sandbox boundaries, and approval policy.
  • Run a plan → implement → verify → review → capture loop with humans accountable for final judgment.
  • Standardize the whole system into something a teammate can read, audit, and adopt.

Prerequisites

  • Professional JavaScript or TypeScript experience.
  • Basic comfort with the terminal and Git, including branches, diffs, and commits.
  • Some hands-on time with at least one AI coding assistant such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, or a similar tool.
  • A laptop you can install software on, with Node.js LTS, npm, and Git available on your PATH.
  • One AI coding tool installed and signed in, plus a terminal and editor you are comfortable using.
  • Optionally, an MCP server you would like to try during the workshop.

Who is this for?

This workshop is for developers who already use an AI coding tool and want to move past ad hoc prompting into deliberate, repeatable workflows. It is especially well suited for senior engineers and tech leads who want their team’s use of AI to be reviewable, auditable, and teachable—not tribal knowledge. Prior experience with skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, sandboxing, or approval systems is not required.

RSVP to Attend Online

Replay coming soon.

The Blueprint

Build a complete AI coding workflow by layering project instructions, skills, hooks, subagents, and MCP into one reviewable system.

Move beyond ad hoc prompting and learn how to design AI coding workflows that are reusable, reviewable, and safe. Build project instructions, skills, hooks, subagents, and automation recipes you can carry across tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.

Warning: High intensity learning environment.

9:30AM
Why basic AI coding workflows break down
10:00AM
Project instructions, rules & repo memory
10:30AM
Skills as reusable workflow recipes
11:30AM
Deterministic automation with hooks
12:00PM
Lunch Break
1:00PM
Subagents & parallel workflows
1:30PM
MCP & external context lab
2:00PM
Capstone — build the full feature workflow end to end
3:00PM
Debrief — what to standardize for a team, and what to avoid
Prefer to attend in-person?
Join us in downtown Minneapolis, MN. Limited seats available.