Mike Egberts The Netherlands 6H AGO

After about 18 months of building software with AI, I realized that reliability wasn't primarily a model problem. Bigger context windows and more clever prompts didn't fix it. What did help was treating the AI like a developer joining an existing team instead of like a chatbot. Real developers don't work from memory. They inspect production, read the documentation, check the tickets, and use proven tools. I built an environment that lets the AI do the same. The workflow is tool-agnostic, so it can be rebuilt with whatever AI client and stack you already use. Step-by-step: 1. I gave the AI a persistent task and history store that it can read from and write to. This is the core of the workflow. Mine lives behind an MCP tool, but any queryable store can work. Every architectural decision, blocker, and progress note gets written there instead of being left in the chat. 2. I open every session with a stand-up. Before writing a single line of code, the AI pulls what was in progress, what's blocked, what changed since the last session, and which architectural decisions still hold. About 30 seconds later, we're both looking at the same project. Then we build. 3. I exposed real operations as MCP tools instead of relying on "write code" prompts. I wrapped specific, tested actions—such as creating a page, defining a data model, wiring an integration, and running a migration—as tools. The AI composes these known-good building blocks into larger solutions instead of regenerating infrastructure every session. I call this wave coding, and it's the biggest reason the output stays consistent. 4. I made verification a rule: before touching anything, the AI reads the live database, API state, logs, and files. It checks ground truth first instead of making assumptions. 5. I made the chat disposable and the log canonical. If it isn't logged, it didn't happen. The task store is the single source of truth, not the conversation. The payoff is that I can stop halfway through a feature, close my laptop, and come back days later. The AI reconstructs the project from its own history, so I don't spend 20 minutes re-explaining it. Full disclosure: I built this into my own platform, WebsitePublisher.ai, which currently has 43 MCP tools and 105 integration building blocks. It's delivered as an add-on that plugs into the AI client I already use over MCP, so there's no new app to learn. Nothing here is locked to that platform, though: the workflow itself works with any MCP client and any store the AI can query. I'm curious whether anyone else is running their AI this way or solving the amnesia problem from a different angle.