Free Playbook for Software Engineers with Adarsh Srivastava

This free playbook equips software engineers to work AI first across the entire lifecycle for the next 20 years. It explains how to pair with AI every day, from planning and coding to testing, security, DevOps, and system design. The guidance is practical and metric driven, so you can improve speed and quality without losing control of reliability, privacy, or cost. Each section blends clear explanations with ready to use prompt cards, checklists, and templates that you can paste directly into your workflow.

You will learn how to design intent before implementation, use AI for scaffolding and refactoring, and verify outputs with tests, types, and evaluation harnesses. The playbook shows how to apply retrieval for context, add function calling safely, and build guardrails that prevent prompt injection, privacy leaks, and tool misuse. It also provides a 90 day plan to build habits, ship portfolio projects, and track progress with dashboards for cycle time, test coverage, task success, latency, and spend.

What is inside

• Mindset and principles for AI first engineering with a focus on clarity, safety, and measurable outcomes
• Daily workflow for editors, repos, CI, and reviews that integrates AI assistants and automation
• Prompt cards for test first development, minimal patches, design options, property tests, security reviews, logs and metrics, incident summaries, retrieval evaluation, and end to end evaluation harnesses
• Detailed tables that map the shift across coding, testing, security, DevOps, and documentation, plus role specific responsibilities
• Four figure set that visualizes adoption trends, skill priorities, time allocation changes, and productivity impact
• A 90 day upskilling program with weekly goals, artifacts, and portfolio deliverables
• Team rollout guidance that covers standards, data handling, licensing, approvals, and risk reviews

Who should use it

• Individual contributors who want faster delivery and stronger tests
• Tech leads who need repeatable patterns for reviews, reliability, and cost control
• Engineering managers who want measurable improvements without disrupting existing stacks

The result is a complete, professional guide that turns AI into a daily collaborator while keeping you firmly in charge of design, correctness, and ethics.