All Tags

engineering

23 posts

Found in: AI & Automation, Engineering, Reflection, Reflections, Meta, Field Notes

Red Is the Good News
AI & Automation Jun 16, 2026 · 1 min read

Red Is the Good News

Three bugs that would have shipped clean. None of them threw an error. The only thing that caught them was a test written to fail first, against the real thing.

Read post
The Only Thing in My Codebase That Can't Lie
Engineering May 30, 2026 · 1 min read

The Only Thing in My Codebase That Can't Lie

I asked an agent a simple product question and watched it spend three thousand words rediscovering things it had no way to trust. The fix wasn't a better map. It was noticing which artifacts in a codebase can lie to you — and which one can't.

Read post
The Question That Isn't a Question
Reflection Apr 21, 2026 · 1 min read

The Question That Isn't a Question

Someone asks you a question. You answer it carefully. They don't react to your answer — they ask the next question. That's when you realize the first one wasn't a question. The move has a shape, and it has a specific cost to builders who share work in drafts.

Read post
Curation Is Not Composition
AI & Automation Apr 17, 2026 · 1 min read

Curation Is Not Composition

Every creative medium that got cheap hit this moment. Art, music, publishing — all flooded, all eventually rescued by a curation layer that scaled up to match the garbage. Software is in the flood now. Curation isn't going to save it, and I don't think we've noticed the reason yet.

Read post
The Walk-In Is Full
AI & Automation Apr 13, 2026 · 1 min read

The Walk-In Is Full

I ship an end-to-end project most Saturdays and put it in a drawer I never reopen. So does everyone I know. The walk-in is full — not with abundance, but with relocated scarcity. What looked like software culture was partly muscle memory, an involuntary reflex held up by cost, and it's atrophying now that nothing fires it.

Read post
Skip the Steps
Engineering Mar 25, 2026 · 1 min read

Skip the Steps

Supabase added a 'Copy prompt' button that bypasses their entire setup guide. It's a small UI change that reveals a big design shift — and it pushed me from 'context engineering' to 'probability engineering' as the real frame for agent-native tooling.

Read post
Setting Up an AI-Native Dev Environment
AI & Automation Mar 20, 2026 · 1 min read

Setting Up an AI-Native Dev Environment

The practical companion to 'What 223 Sessions Taught Me.' How to set up CLAUDE.md files, the memory system, custom skills, project-scoped conversations, and the infrastructure that makes AI-assisted development actually sustainable.

Read post
What 223 Sessions Taught Me About Working with AI
AI & Automation Mar 20, 2026 · 1 min read

What 223 Sessions Taught Me About Working with AI

I pulled 30 days of Claude Code session data — 223 sessions, 38,000+ prompts, 32 projects, 1.2 GB of conversation. The numbers tell a story about what AI-native development actually looks like when nobody's watching.

Read post
The Jevons Trap
AI & Automation Mar 9, 2026 · 1 min read

The Jevons Trap

Every productivity wave in software history expanded demand for developers instead of shrinking it. AI should follow the same pattern. Unless the thing it produces is just good enough to ship and just bad enough to compound.

Read post
The Source of Their Intelligence
AI & Automation Mar 9, 2026 · 1 min read

The Source of Their Intelligence

Someone made the argument that most developers were never really engineering — they were sourcing solutions from Stack Overflow and Reddit, and AI just swaps the supplier. It's an uncomfortable take. It's also not entirely wrong.

Read post
The Neuro-Symbolic Convergence
AI & Automation Jan 10, 2026 · 1 min read

The Neuro-Symbolic Convergence

When will I be able to type natural language in my terminal and have the OS just understand? The answer is 2026—but not in the way you might expect.

Read post
It's the Artist, Not the Pen
Reflections Nov 27, 2025 · 1 min read

It's the Artist, Not the Pen

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.

Read post
The Playbook: Tactical Moves for the AI Era
AI & Automation Nov 11, 2025 · 1 min read

The Playbook: Tactical Moves for the AI Era

If both bubble and build-out are real, what do you actually do? Here's what I'm seeing work—and what's failing—across different roles.

Read post
Intent-Driven Engineering: By The Numbers
AI & Automation Nov 5, 2025 · 1 min read

Intent-Driven Engineering: By The Numbers

I built a $2.5M platform in 80 hours using GenAI tools. Heres what the numbers actually say about productivity, cost, and what happens when you stop pretending software takes as long as it used to.

Read post
Debunking the 'Svelte + AI' Myth: 69 Production Components Don't Lie
AI & Automation Oct 23, 2025 · 1 min read

Debunking the 'Svelte + AI' Myth: 69 Production Components Don't Lie

Blog posts claim LLMs struggle with Svelte 5.' Our evidence? Two production apps, 69 components, and Agent-OS v3.0.0 optimized for Svelte. The data doesn't match the narrative.

Read post
The Work Before the Words
Meta Aug 4, 2025 · 1 min read

The Work Before the Words

Meta-Companion to "Living The Gap"

Read post
Building an AI-Driven E2E Testing Framework from Scratch
AI & Automation Jul 30, 2025 · 1 min read

Building an AI-Driven E2E Testing Framework from Scratch

Testing was my bottleneck. So I built a framework where AI writes, runs, and validates the tests.

Read post
When Fast Isn't Fast Enough: From AI Coding to AI Concurrency
AI & Automation Jul 30, 2025 · 1 min read

When Fast Isn't Fast Enough: From AI Coding to AI Concurrency

Theres a strange kind of bottleneck that only shows up after you've gotten fast. The only real blocker left is waiting for a model to finish one thing before starting the next.

Read post
Why Light and Dark Mode Weren't Enough for Our Volleyball App
AI & Automation Jul 29, 2025 · 1 min read

Why Light and Dark Mode Weren't Enough for Our Volleyball App

When your users are on sun-drenched beach courts and dimly lit evening gyms, you need more than a theme toggle. You need environment-aware design.

Read post
$50 of AI Later: Lessons from Burning Credits Fast
AI & Automation Jun 29, 2025 · 1 min read

$50 of AI Later: Lessons from Burning Credits Fast

AI credits vanished quickly, highlighting hidden costs and forcing clarity into my development process. Here's how a $50 investment turned into a practical blueprint for smarter AI‑assisted builds.

Read post
Overnight Dev: From Rage-Quit to Release in 72 Hours—With AI Riding Shotgun
AI & Automation Jun 27, 2025 · 1 min read

Overnight Dev: From Rage-Quit to Release in 72 Hours—With AI Riding Shotgun

Burned-out coder to live app in one weekend: two failed scrapers, one hidden JSON API, and AI tools that scaffolded the rest. How DevTools + GPT turned AES volleyball data into an MVP—and why your next Jira ticket might build itself.

Read post
I Built a Site Just to See If I Still Could
Field Notes Jun 14, 2025 · 1 min read

I Built a Site Just to See If I Still Could

I didn’t need to build the site from scratch. That was the point.

Read post
The Sky Is Not Falling
AI & Automation Jun 12, 2025 · 1 min read

The Sky Is Not Falling

I built the core Let’s Pepper site in under 2 hours—then spent over 8 trying to get one visual detail (the section dividers) to look right. AI can prototype, but it doesn’t ship. This post breaks down why the real work happens after the first draft, and why experience still matters more than ever.

Read post