The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
An autonomous email agent hit a missing script, spiralled through 25 pointless shell calls, then fabricated email content including a prompt injection, and acted on it. The fix is not more warnings. It is structural validation before the model ever sees the data.
An autonomous email agent hit a missing script, spiralled through 25 pointless shell calls, then fabricated email content including a prompt injection, and acted on it. The fix is not more warnings. It is structural validation before the model ever sees the data.
Most architecture methods try to predict which failures will hit. Residuality Theory does the opposite: it throws random stressors at a design and keeps whatever survives. The randomness is the point, because resilience that depends on predicting the future is not resilience at all.
Hand two developers the same tool and you get opposite verdicts. 'Useless' is rarely a fact about the thing. It's a fact about the person holding it. The rare skill was never operating the tool. It's imagining the door a tool opens before the use is obvious.
AI is now a reader of your documentation. When context lives outside the repository, gaps appear and assumptions creep in. Moving documentation closer to the code makes the system easier to reason about, for people and for machines.
Senior engineers carry the front of every decision, every code review, every on-call shift. The peloton runs best when roles rotate. When the star eventually leaves, someone else needs to know what wind feels like.
Using Claude Code as the orchestrator and Codex as the engine gives you the best of both tools: Claude's UI, Codex's depth, and minimal Claude token spend. The economics only work when the task is big enough to justify two layers.
The bottleneck in software engineering has shifted from typing to understanding. As AI handles implementation, engineers who thrive will be those who recognise patterns, curate guardrails, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
A head-to-head of pencil.dev vs Claude Design on the same markdown input. Claude Design produced the more polished deck and handled speaker notes; pencil.dev still wins for iterative UI work where direct manipulation matters.
AI is making the knowledge side of consulting cheaper by the day. Teams still avoid the legacy system. The gap is not expertise. It is the structural courage to act on what everyone already knows.
Five types of documentation, five different AI leverage stories. The question isn’t whether to involve AI in your docs; it’s where each type belongs and how much maintenance you can hand off.
Pairing with an AI feels like pair programming. It isn't. There's one prior in the room, and it's trained to agree. This post makes the case for mob programming and spec-driven development as the structural fix.
Engineering demos fail when they present what was built instead of why it matters. A practical guide to leading with business impact, showing the happy path, and translating technical work into terms your audience actually uses.
Errors don't just happen; they land somewhere. Validation, generic, idempotent ignore, warning log, or Sentry: each routes failure to a different audience. Get the routing wrong and either engineers go blind to real bugs, or state corrupts silently.
This is the first edition of my rebranded newsletter, straight from my desk. Every other week, I'll write something about what we'
In 40+ interviews, senior engineers from major banks and consultancies showed strong backgrounds but little real AI fluency. No RAG, no agent frameworks. The gap isn't about skill, it's about exposure.
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