How I Directed an AI Agent Through 3 Real Architecture Decisions, and What I Learned

In two weeks, I built Retro Dynamics Agent, an app that generates retrospective activities for teams, facilitates them on a real-time collaborative board, and turns the outcomes into Jira or Azure DevOps tickets. I built it working with an AI coding agent, Claude Code, throughout almost the entire process: design, implementation, production debugging, and documentation. I do not want to tell another “I used AI and it wrote the code for me” story. We have heard that one enough. What I found more interesting were the parts of the project where there was no obvious answer in a tutorial, and how the work was divided in those situations. I defined the constraints and made the underlying decisions. The agent proposed concrete technical solutions and implemented them. Then the responsibility for verifying that everything actually worked, not just that it compiled, came back to me. Here are three examples from the project. 1.- Connecting to Jira without server-side sessions or frontend memory I wanted any team to be able to connect its own Jira account through OAuth, instead of relying on a global token that only I could configure. The problem was that my application runs entirely on serverless functions. Nothing stays in memory between requests, and the frontend does not maintain its own state either. No localStorage. No router. An OAuth login means leaving the application, authenticating with Atlassian, and then coming back. But coming back to what, if nothing remembers which screen you were on? Before touching the code, I asked the agent to create a complete implementation plan, including the files that would need to change, the design decisions, and the scope. I reviewed that plan as if it were a pull request from another developer. I made decisions such as: For now, only Jira would use OAuth. Azure DevOps would keep its manual token flow because setting up OAuth there is considerably more involved. Tokens would be encrypted before being stored in the database, never sa