The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
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.
Voice is where AI product differentiation is heading. This post walks through ElevenLabs voice cloning and conversational agents in enough detail to evaluate whether the technology is ready for your use case.
Your codebase degrades the same way shared resources do: not from malice, but from missing governance. Elinor Ostrom proved the commons can survive. Her principles map to software teams with uncomfortable precision.
Business users love Lovable. Engineers tend to panic. A real-world case study of how to wrap an AI builder in guardrails so non-technical teams can move fast without quietly rewriting the systems that give your product its edge.
Every software company claims to be different. The "we don't need X because we have culture" exemption is special pleading. The four phrases that reveal it, and the questions that break them open.
CTOs who built their company's survival by doing everything can't escape that role by scheduling a holiday. Moving from doing to enabling is a skill and identity shift at once. One thing handed off permanently is where the exit starts.
I used to teach people to code. And looking back, I was teaching students to write it by hand while the tools that write it for them were getting better every single month. So what should a coding classroom actually look like now?
Every legacy codebase is a palimpsest: layers of decisions written on top of each other, none fully erased. Geoffrey Dhuyvetters argues that what looks like technical debt is often stratigraphy, and you read it before you rewrite it.
Most AI-powered customer support is optimised for deflection, not resolution. The problem isn’t bad agents, it’s architecture: no shared context, no real permissions, no escalation path that works.
AI removes bottlenecks until it reaches the one that doesn’t move: human cognition. The faster AI makes your system, the more your team’s mental capacity becomes the constraint. You can’t add more of it.
The claude -w flag spins up an isolated git worktree in seconds, so you can keep coding while a long-running task occupies your main session. No conflicts, no context pollution, no waiting.
When AI closes the execution gap, taste becomes the differentiator. Curation, judgement, and the willingness to say “not this” compound over time in ways that models can’t replicate.
In 2010, every business convinced itself it needed a mobile app. Fast forward to 2025, and the script is identical, just with AI replacing mobile as the technology everyone insists they can't afford to be without.
AI-generated content has made polished writing look suspicious. The deeper cost is the thinking you skip when you outsource the words that define your position.
The quick fix isn't cheaper. It's cheaper today. Bram Devries traces how deferred fixes compound into emergencies, and argues that naming the trade-off out loud is the only way to break the cycle.
Half of today's AI best practices are coping mechanisms for temporary scarcity, not timeless engineering insights. Geoffrey Dhuyvetters traces the arc from SMS bundles to token limits, and argues the price curve only goes one direction.
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