I help engineering teams have more fun and ship better software

I'm Steven Diamante, a technical coach based in Raleigh, NC. For years before coding agents existed, I was coaching software teams in XP practices: test-driven development, refactoring, pairing, and ensemble programming. The pattern was always the same. When a team learns to work in small, safe steps, the fear goes away, the defects drop, and the work gets fun again.

I still code every day. I'm an Anthropic certified architect, I've spoken at CodeMash on working with coding agents, and I write the Refactor to Grow newsletter. The story below is how I went from AI skeptic to shipping production LLM products in half the time, using the same discipline I teach.

Production Code with Coding Agents

Six months of shipping scalable, maintainable applications with Claude Code

Multiple Claude Code sessions running simultaneously

Steven Diamante presenting at a technical conference

April 2025–Present

From Reluctant User to Shipping in Half the Time: My Journey Building Production LLM Products

In April 2025, I joined a company building LLM-powered products and started pairing with Claude Code. I was skeptical, treating it like a code generator while I refactored by hand in WebStorm. Six months later, I barely touch my IDE. The agent does it all: TDD, code reviews, refactoring, even exploratory testing.

2-3x

Faster than solo coding (features that took me 3-4 weeks manually now take 1-2 weeks with agents)

2 weeks

Built production RAG chatbot (typically 6-8 weeks for similar features I've shipped previously)

3 days

Shipped Kanban boards with TDD workflow (estimated 2 weeks if coded manually based on past projects)

Weekly

Deployment cadence vs. monthly in my previous manual coding roles

"My biggest breakthrough? Planning with the agent before coding. ASCII wireframes, test plans, architecture diagrams: it avoids bugs and unwanted features before a single line of code is written."

I've built RAG-powered chatbots, MCP-enabled AI tools, evaluation test suites, and complex React UIs, all in microservices serving multi-tenant SaaS customers with vastly different requirements. The domain is complex (manufacturing with literal moving parts), but the quality remains high because I apply XP practices: TDD, continuous refactoring, small batches, tight feedback loops.

Curious what this looks like for your team? Start with the half-day workshop.