I had a 46-citation research paper about autonomous documentation. Academic frameworks rarely survive contact with a real codebase. So I asked an agent to turn theory into working code—and watched what happened.
The problem with AI coding assistants isn't capability—it's coordination. A single agent can write code. But who checks the work? Who remembers what was decided? I built a system where specialists implement and verifiers catch drift.
I wrote a voice guide to help AI match my writing style. It worked too well—the AI learned the example phrases, not the principles behind them. Here's how I fixed it, and what it taught me about the difference between describing a voice and understanding one.
How many ideas die in the space between waking and coffee? Vercel's Agent Skills announcement made me think about what changes when engineering judgment becomes installable—and who gets to build things when the execution gap narrows.
We're not short on people who can chat with a bot. We're starved for people who can deconstruct a business process into atomic units an AI can actually execute. That gap has a name now.
College students aren't just using AI chatbots anymore. They're building automation systems, running local LLMs, and treating software engineering as a just-in-time capability. The 'Chat Terminal' era is over.
Wade Foster doesn't send memos about AI. He runs hackathons and show-and-tells. That distinction matters more than most CEOs realize—and it's the same thing I've been telling my own teams.
Every e-commerce platform is racing to add AI features. But what if the real opportunity isn't AI features—it's AI architecture? What if the store itself could generate in real-time?
If I handed you my camera right now—same lens, same settings, same light—would you get the same shot? The tools are available to everyone. The output isn't.
I used to say 'just one more level' until 3am. Now I say 'just one more version.' The game changed. The compulsion didn't.
It's Thanksgiving. And while I'm grateful for the usual things—family, health, increasingly creative leftover sandwiches—I need to take a moment to thank the team that really made this year possible. They don't eat. They don't sleep. And they never ask for PTO.
Instructions arent enough. To make agentic workflows reliable, I had to build a meta-agent to police my coding agents. Welcome to the unglamorous world of AI Ops.
Agentic software is powerful, but it needs guardrails. Im finding the most important work isn't coding, but architecting the systems that constrain the code.