We are producing more with AI. What we’re producing less of, apparently, is honest reflection on what that actually means. The internet is full of frameworks, prompt guides, and tutorials promising you’ll “10x your productivity overnight.” The question nobody seems to want to answer is whether any of it is actually good. Most of it […] The post Hard-Won Lessons…
#ai for developers
16 posts
31 May
27 May
Agentic development tools have started to change the way I approach software work. Instead of only asking for a small autocomplete suggestion or a quick explanation, I can now ask an agent to inspect a problem, propose a plan, make code changes, and even iterate on a solution. That can be incredibly useful, especially when […] The post How I…
18 May
Not everything needs to be AI-powered, even within an AI-first tool. I recently learned this while writing a Claude skill paired with the Claude in Chrome extension, and I got a lot more clarity on how to get the most out of these tools. Here’s what I learned. Writing My First Claude Skill I was […] The post Don’t AI…
15 May
One of the more noticeable changes with coding agents shows up when you sit down to pair with someone newer to the codebase for mentorship pair programming. On the surface, things can look like they’re going unusually well. Code appears quickly, the structure is reasonable, and there are fewer moments where someone gets stuck trying […] The post Thanks to…
14 May
I’ve been using Claude Code steadily for the last three-plus months. I wouldn’t call myself a power user, but I’ve settled into a rhythm that works: tight PR loops, lean on it for real feature work, push back when it wanders. Why I Finally Bothered with Claude Code Insights The tooling in this space moves […] The post What I…
12 May
Most agent setups are overbuilt. You can feel the framework wanting to happen before the problem is even clear. There is a planner, a runtime, a memory layer, a tool registry, a workflow engine, and a long explanation for why all of that is necessary. Then you look at the actual job, and it is […] The post Try This…
11 May
One might think computer vision models are supposed to be easy to put into production. There are whole companies built on that promise: label a few images, click train, click deploy, done. In practice, it’s messier. Most of us working with these models aren’t ML experts, and moving fast to keep up with the industry […] The post Lessons from…
7 May
Pair programming has always had a bit of a reputation problem. It’s easy to look at two people working on the same task and see inefficiency. More coordination, more talking, less obvious forward progress. Even on teams that value it, there’s usually some quiet pressure to just go knock something out instead. That tension has […] The post If You…
20 Apr
My client team recently updated its code review policy: an approval from an AI tool is now all that’s needed to merge. In this post, I’ll reflect on this change and what it means for the way our team works together. My Personal Relationship with Code Review Reviewing PRs is one of my very favorite […] The post Here’s What…
13 Apr
In a time of pressing adaptation to AI, it’s tempting to get to the result with fast prompts. But I’ve found that with some planning before prompting, I get better results that scale well. Here’s what I ask before I get started. What is the end goal? Am I solving a bug ticket? If it’s […] The post Questions to…
7 Apr
You might be familiar with this classic XKCD strip about SQL injection: What’s happening here? Imagine there is a form where a student can fill in their name, and this input gets incorporated into a SQL query. Something like: When the name is interpolated into that query, it becomes: SQL statements are separated by semicolons, […] The post Your AI…
24 Mar
This tutorial is for developers, designers who code, or anyone new to AI who wants a hands-on introduction to building a custom AI chatbot that can search and answer questions using your own data. I wanted to build an AI-powered tool for our team, but I had zero experience building AI applications—so I decided to […] The post How to…
18 Mar
All good nerds love a good dashboard, right? So when I saw people building Claude Code dashboards online, I wanted to learn from my own usage. The reason dashboards were having a moment online was that Claude Code has built-in OpenTelemetry support. That means you can pipe metrics and logs to any OTLP-compatible backend pretty […] The post What I…
14 Mar
Aristotle gets credit for first principles thinking, but the concept has never been more relevant than it is right now. As we shift to building software with AI tools, this is one of the most important mental models you can carry into every client engagement. The Core Idea First principles thinking is the practice of […] The post First Principles…
3 Mar
Every project starts the same way. There’s a problem worth solving, a rough sense of the constraints, and a blank page. The hard part isn’t writing the first line of code—it’s figuring out which direction to go when several look equally reasonable. Should this be an event-driven system or a synchronous pipeline? Do we split […] The post How I…
26 Feb
Think about an HTML page. At its core, it’s just a container—a bounded environment with a set of rules, capabilities, and constraints. Everything that happens inside it is governed by what you put there. Now imagine that same concept, but instead of DOM elements and event listeners, you’re placing AI agents with distinct personas into […] The post Digital Clones…