AI Assisted Coding: Treating AI Like a Junior Engineer - Onboarding Practices for AI Collaboration

In this special episode, Sergey Sergyenko, CEO of Cybergizer, shares his practical framework for AI-assisted development built on transactional models, Git workflows, and architectural conventions. He explains why treating AI like a junior engineer, keeping commits atomic, and maintaining rollback strategies creates production-ready code rather than just prototypes.

Vibecoding: An Automation Design Instrument

"I would define Vibecoding as an automation design instrument. It's not a tool that can deliver end-to-end solution, but it's like a perfect set of helping hands for a person who knows what they need to do."

Sergey positions vibecoding clearly: it's not magic, it's an automation design tool. The person using it must know what they need to accomplish—AI provides the helping hands to execute that vision faster. This framing sets expectations appropriately: AI speeds up development significantly, but it's not a silver bullet that works without guidance. The more you practice vibecoding, the better you understand its boundaries. Sergey's definition places vibecoding in the evolution of development tools: from scaffolding to co-pilots to agentic coding to vibecoding. Each step increases automation, but the human architect remains essential for providing direction, context, and validation.

Pair Programming with the Machine

"If you treat AI as a junior engineer, it's very easy to adopt it. Ah, okay, maybe we just use the old traditions, how we onboard juniors to the team, and let AI follow this step."

One of Sergey's most practical insights is treating AI like a junior engineer joining your team. This mental model immediately clarifies roles and expectations. You wouldn't let a junior architect your system or write all your tests—so why let AI? Instead, apply existing onboarding practices: pair programming, code reviews, test-driven development, architectural guidance. This approach leverages Extreme Programming practices that have worked for decades. The junior engineer analogy helps teams understand that AI needs mentorship, clear requirements, and frequent validation. Just as you'd provide a junior with frameworks and conventions to follow, you constrain AI with established architectural patterns and framework conventions like Ruby on Rails.

The Transactional Model: Atomic Commits and Rollback

"When you're working with AI, the more atomic commits it delivers, more easy for you to kind of guide and navigate it through the process of development."

Sergey's transactional approach transforms how developers work with AI. Instead of iterating endlessly when something goes wrong, commit frequently with atomic changes, then rollback and restart if validation fails. Each commit should be small, independent, and complete—like a feature flag you can toggle. The commit message includes the prompt sequence used to generate the code and rollback instructions. 

This approach makes the Git repository the context manager, not just the AI's memory. When you need to guide AI, you can reference specific commits and their context. This mirrors trunk-based development practices where teams commit directly to master with small, verified changes. The cost of rollback stays minimal because changes are atomic, making this strategy far more efficient than trying to fix broken implementations through iteration.

Context Management: The Weak Point and the Solution

"Managing context and keeping context is one of the weak points of today's coding agents, therefore we need to be very mindful in how we manage that context for the agent."

Context management challenges current AI coding tools—they forget, lose thread, or misinterpret requirements over long sessions. Sergey's solution is embedding context within the commit history itself. Each commit links back to the specific reasoning behind that code: why it was accepted, what iterations it took, and how to undo it if needed. This creates a persistent context trail that survives beyond individual AI sessions. When starting new features, developers can reference previous commits and their context to guide the AI. The transactional model doesn't just prov