In early 2025, we set out to explore a bold question: can AI-powered development fundamentally change how we build software? After a carefully controlled experiment comparing AI-assisted and traditional teams, the answer was clear: yes, it can.
Using tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot Agent, our AI-assisted teams delivered projects 45% faster, with high code quality and much less manual effort. But the real breakthrough was learning a new way of working. Success came from mastering a different mindset: writing clear prompts, breaking work into smaller steps, focusing on structured specifications (spec-first), and maintaining strong code review discipline to ensure quality.
Before AI agents, developers wrote every line manually and progress depended heavily on personal expertise and speed. Now, engineers orchestrate AI: guiding it with prompts, validating outputs, and accelerating development across the full stack. Tasks that took hours such as scaffolding services or building UI screens now happen in minutes.
AI Coding Agents work inside your IDE. You describe what you want in a chat interface, and the agent generates or modifies code across multiple files. They understand your project structure and external contexts (through Model Context Providers). They don’t just autocomplete, they help implement real features, following your project's quality guidelines — and their suggestions reflect best practices found in public code across the industry.
The goal of this handbook is to teach you how to work with AI agents effectively and responsibly. You’ll learn practical workflows that unlock faster delivery, cross-stack flexibility, and higher creativity while keeping you, the engineer, fully in control.
This is your guide to the new playbook of modern engineering at Modus Create. Let’s get started;