AI coding agents can generate hundreds of lines of code in seconds—but speed doesn’t mean you’re building the right product. Without steerability, agents keep generating with no idea when they’re done, and you discover hours later you’ve built the wrong thing. The breakthrough is small steps: clear goals, fast feedback, and controllable increments. Each step completes in minutes, giving you constant verification that you’re building what users actually need. Add strict linting enforced by pre-commit hooks, and agents can’t commit messy code—they refactor automatically. I’ll show what this looks like in practice: small, steerable steps that keep AI building the right thing instead of generating code you’ll spend hours debugging. Small steps aren’t just good practice. They’re how you make AI agents build what you actually want.

Steven Diamante is a technical coach who helps software teams get real value from AI coding agents. Most teams use AI to generate code fast, but then spend hours debugging. Steven teaches teams to use