Ideas

The strangest hobby at the table

Writing code by hand used to be the job. Soon it will be a hobby, like woodworking or growing your own veg. What a company pays for now is judgment: knowing what to build, catching the answer that looks right and isn't, deciding when it's good enough to ship.

Residuality Theory: a different way to think about architecture

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.

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.

The peloton problem

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.

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.

Five ways to fail

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.

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.

Your network isn’t as safe as you think

Cheap consumer devices from Amazon and BestBuy ship with factory-installed malware and botnet software. The Zero Trust principle isn’t paranoia; it’s the only safe assumption for any network you don’t fully control.

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.

Technical due diligence before acquiring a software company

What over 180 SaaS audits reveal about the technical risks that restructure software acquisition deals, and how to assess them before signing. Real data on documentation debt, testing gaps, key person risk, and the five findings that change deal terms.

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