AI

The executable code style guide

A written style guide is a museum piece nobody enforces. An LLM changes that: it reads rules in plain prose and applies them on every pull request, reaching judgment calls no linter could express. The style guide stops being a document and becomes a runtime.

My email agent invented a prompt injection, then fell for it

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.

This tool is useless

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.

Documentation has a new reader and why it should belong inside the codebase

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.

Claude up front, Codex in the back

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.

From syntax tinkering to systems thinking

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.

Building a slide deck with pencil.dev and Claude Design

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.

Courage as a service

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.

Stop letting documentation rot

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 a yes-machine

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.

The AI skills gap

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.

Hermes: the agent that doesn't quit when you close your laptop

Hermes is an open-source AI agent that runs on a server, remembers across sessions, and builds reusable skills over time. The shift it represents: AI moving from something you summon to something that runs.

Building a customer support AI agent that learns before it speaks

A customer support AI agent built in stages: shadow mode first, internal notes second, auto-send only after the data earns it. A walkthrough of the architecture, the knowledge base design, and the lessons that held up.

LLMs everywhere, even in cars

LLMs are no longer a tab you open. They're the interface layer between intent and every system underneath. This post maps what ambient AI, edge inference, and agent-as-infrastructure mean for how you design modern software.

The end of the all-you-can-eat buffet

The all-you-can-eat era of AI is ending. Compute constraints, heavier models, and a fully hooked user base are pushing providers toward pay-as-you-go. That shift will force better choices, smaller models, and fiercer competition between tools.

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