[{"_1":2,"_3":-5,"_4":-5},"loaderData",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"actionData","errors","root",{"_28":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":40,"_41":42,"_43":44,"_45":46,"_47":48,"_49":50,"_51":52,"_53":54,"_55":56,"_57":58},"routes/_store+/_readers+/email_author.$slug/route",{"_9":10,"_11":-5},"book",{"_12":13,"_14":15,"_16":17,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23},"currentUser","id","Z2lkOi8vbGVhbnB1Yi9TdG9yZTo6Qm9va1Byb2R1Y3QvODA4MjY","title","Gravel Track to Paved Path","state","unpublished","contactAuthorMethod","email","aboutText","

An AI coding agent can write a Spring Boot service in minutes, and it runs on your laptop. Then you deploy it to a container platform and the cracks show: it drops in-flight requests on every redeploy, exhausts the database's connection limit when it scales out, and reports \"healthy\" while the JVM is still cold. None of that is about the code the agent wrote. It is about the distributed system the code has to live in.

Gravel Track to Paved Path is the missing manual for that gap: how a small, senior team ships cloud-native Java to production with coding agents, and can prove that what shipped is correct, safe and operable. It is built on one worked delivery you follow from an empty repository to a deployed, evidenced feature, and it insists on two things the hype skips. First, cloud-native is how, not where: running Spring Boot on a managed platform does not make it cloud-native; a set of design choices does, and agents make them only if their environment makes them the default. Second, agents need a harness, not a leash: deterministic gates (contracts, tests, architectural rules, quality and security scanners) that catch weak output automatically, so you move fast and prove correctness.

The book is deliberately short, opinionated, and tool-agnostic across OpenAI Codex CLI and Anthropic Claude Code. You build a minimum-viable harness (the gravel track), run one governed vertical slice on it end to end on AWS, then standardise only what the route proved into a reusable pattern (the paved path). It is written for senior Java and Spring Boot engineers adopting agentic development on real, governed systems; it teaches the coding agent and the cloud runtime as you go.

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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