📰 Dev.to · Ian Johnson

Articles from Dev.to · Ian Johnson · 11 articles · Updated every 3 hours · View all reads

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This week I wrote a blog series about applying an agent harness to an existing codebase, and how you can do it too! Here's a link to the first post.

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 1d ago

This week I wrote a blog series about applying an agent harness to an existing codebase, and how you can do it too! Here's a link to the first post.

The Agent Harness: Turning AI Slop Into Shipping Software ...

Beyond Laravel: Applying the Agent Harness to Any Stack

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 3d ago

Beyond Laravel: Applying the Agent Harness to Any Stack

The tools change. The strategy doesn't. How to apply the agent harness approach to Rails, Django, Next.js, Spring Boot, .NET, Go, Phoenix, and whatever you're s

Custom Skills: The End-to-End Workflow Made Executable

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 3d ago

Custom Skills: The End-to-End Workflow Made Executable

How two slash commands turned a repeatable workflow into a consistent, end-to-end process — from Jira ticket to merged PR, with TDD and harness feedback at ever

Building the Agent Harness: Subdirectory CLAUDE.md Files

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 3d ago

Building the Agent Harness: Subdirectory CLAUDE.md Files

The technical deep-dive on the harness system. Why one big instruction file doesn't scale, how subdirectory CLAUDE.md files scope guidance, and what goes in eac

Trunk-Based Development with Short-Lived Branches

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 4d ago

Trunk-Based Development with Short-Lived Branches

How trunk-based development, conventional commits, and CI/CD create the fast feedback loop that makes AI-assisted development practical.

No Big-Bang Rewrites: Running Two Frontends Without Losing Your Mind

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 4d ago

No Big-Bang Rewrites: Running Two Frontends Without Losing Your Mind

How to migrate from Blade to React without stopping feature delivery. The two-frontend architecture, environment gating, and the interim wrapper pattern.

Actions, Policies, and the Art of Obvious Code

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 5d ago

Actions, Policies, and the Art of Obvious Code

Extracting controller logic into Action classes with Result DTOs, adding Laravel Policies, and making architecture so obvious an AI agent can't get it wrong.

Traits to Services: Refactoring for Testability (and for Agents)

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 5d ago

Traits to Services: Refactoring for Testability (and for Agents)

How extracting six PHP traits into service classes with contracts created clean boundaries — and why clear boundaries help AI agents more than documentation.

Linting, Static Analysis, and the Pre-Commit Hook That Saved My Sanity

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 5d ago

Linting, Static Analysis, and the Pre-Commit Hook That Saved My Sanity

Adding Pint, Psalm, Prettier, ESLint, and pre-commit hooks — not as busywork, but as machine-checkable standards an AI agent can verify its own work against.

Before You Let an Agent Touch Your Code, Write the Tests

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 5d ago

Before You Let an Agent Touch Your Code, Write the Tests

Why tests are the prerequisite for AI-assisted development — not an afterthought. How wrapping a legacy codebase in tests creates the safety net that makes ever

The Agent Harness: Turning AI Slop Into Shipping Software

Dev.to · Ian Johnson 5d ago

The Agent Harness: Turning AI Slop Into Shipping Software

You can use AI coding agents on real production codebases and get predictable, high-quality results if you treat the agent like a junior engineer who needs guar