5 years of programming here. My setup is embarrassingly simple compared to most in this thread.

VSCodium + Claude Code in the terminal. That's it. No worktrees, no swarms, no orchestrators.

What actually changed my workflow wasn't the tooling, it was realizing I needed to write better specs before touching any of it. I now spend the first 20-30 minutes of any non-trivial task just writing a plain markdown file describing what I want, what I don't want, and what "done" looks like. The agent output quality jumped more from that habit than from any tool switch.

For your workshop: I'd resist the urge to show people the impressive stuff first. The gap between "wow it wrote my whole app" and "why did it silently delete my database logic" closes fast, and people who start with unrealistic expectations struggle more in the long run than people who started slower and actually understand what's happening.