Token spend is the new cloud bill
The token bill for an AI agent is the visible 10 to 30% of what it costs. Review, supervision, rework and ownership make up the rest, and unlike a salary, almost nobody forecasts it.
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Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
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What will the state of AI be like by this time next year?
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Latest posts
Nobody learned a city from a map
The fastest way to learn agentic development is to stop studying it: move in, extract repeatable patterns into skills, and reflect to compound.
Hosting shared document services - WOPI
Ever wanted to build your own Google Docs-style document service? This post introduces WOPI, the open protocol that lets web applications embed Office document editing directly in the browser, while keeping your app in control of storage and permissions.
The disconnect between management and engineering
A mobile app, past its usefulness, was days from being phased out. One email reversed the decision. No discussion. No input from engineering. This is what happens when decision-making drifts too far from the work.
Bots and Boundaries: Two problems, one policy (Part 3)
In part three, we look at both sides of the AI contribution debate. A working patch, real demand, never submitted, rejected because AI was involved. But maintainers are unpaid volunteers, and AI halved the cost of contributing without touching the cost of review. Both sides have a point.
The artificial Turk and our role as software experts
We smile at the 18th-century crowd for being swept up by a box with a man inside, yet today it's easy to hand ChatGPT a vague idea and treat the PRD it returns as gospel. Generative AI is genuinely powerful. We get the best from it when we bring both enthusiasm and a critical eye.
From opt in to default
Developers don't skip standards because they're careless, they skip them because there are fifteen things to remember and the code was the hard part. The real question isn't which tasks your LLM handles well. It's what's still slipping through ungated.
Hire for divers
The AI wave is here, and the industry is already splitting into two: those adapting fast and those falling behind. The gap is widening quickly.
Three Claudes walk into a codebase
The machines aren't replacing developers, they're promoting them. You're no longer just writing code; you're managing agents, reviewing output, and setting standards. Three Claudes walk into a codebase, and suddenly you're a manager.
Running multiple Claude accounts without logging out
Managing multiple Claude Code accounts across machines gets messy fast. Jean-Claude keeps the useful parts in sync, separates account-specific config, and makes switching between personal, team, and client setups far less painful.
How we rewrote our tech stack in under a day
Last week, we deleted 16,000 lines of code, rewrote 11,500, migrated frameworks, ripped out React, and swapped our entire CSS setup with AI. It took less than 6 hours.
Technical debt lost its excuse
Technical debt used to justify meetings, trade-offs, and dedicated sprints. AI has changed that. Cleanup is now fast, cheap, and continuous. Teams that stop debating and start fixing unlock faster delivery and better outcomes.
Conductor: running multiple AI coding agents in parallel
Conductor by Melty Labs makes parallel agent workflows practical by running multiple agents with separate tasks simultaneously. The trade-offs are real but manageable, and this is where development is heading.
I'm using my engineering colleagues as my personal agents
A couple of months ago, I was copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT. Now I'm shipping features, running tests, managing branches, and keeping documentation alive, with a team of agents doing the heavy lifting. All by myself.
Onboard the AI like you'd onboard a developer
Legacy codebases are messy, undocumented, and full of decisions nobody remembers making. But if you can explain it to a new developer, you can onboard an AI and that changes everything.
QA is the last bottleneck
Software development's feedback loop has compressed from years to minutes, but QA remains the last bottleneck, the one place still dependent on human judgment. AI is rapidly closing that gap, and before the year is out, that final human checkpoint may no longer be necessary.
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