Articles

Thoughts on software development, AI, and technology. Sometimes other things too.

2026

  • Newsletter •

    Context Sans

    In Excession, Iain Banks gave a name to the kind of problem a civilization meets exactly once. He called it an Outside Context Problem. The example he reached for was a tribe living happily on its...

  • Newsletter •

    Token Theater

    Let me apologise for this hook. I tried to find a better one. I went rummaging through my own background, tried to shoehorn it into pharmacy. I tried to invent a parable from Japan, where I was a few...

  • Newsletter •

    The Greenfield Privilege

    The kill the code review thinkpieces are coming from two kinds of places: greenfield repos where nobody is teaching anybody anything, and vendors selling the replacement. The team I review for is...

  • Newsletter •

    Average Guacamole

    Apologies for the quiet stretch. Back with something from Simon Willison s interview on Lenny s podcast that I ve been chewing on.Simon said Claude turns out to be an excellent chef. Which doesn t...

  • Newsletter •

    The Other 199,800 Lines

    Andrej Karpathy distilled GPT to 200 lines of Python and called it the algorithmic essence of ChatGPT. He s right. I read the whole thing and understood every line. It didn t help me ship a single...

  • Newsletter •

    Agentifying Your Business

    Somewhere in your company right now, someone is drafting a memo about agentifying the business. It will mention productivity gains, competitive advantage, and a phased rollout. It will not mention...

  • Newsletter •

    What the Exam Blueprint Tells You

    Last week Anthropic launched the Claude Certified Architect, Foundations certification. Sixty proctored multiple choice questions, two hours, $99 per attempt, 720 out of 1,000 to pass. It s their...

  • Newsletter •

    What Outlives the Code

    Joseph Campbell s monomyth says every hero story is the same story wearing different clothes. The hero descends, transforms, returns. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Luke Skywalker. Different languages, same...

  • Newsletter •

    The Simplest Feedback Loop

    The fastest way to improve your AI workflow isn t a better model, a bigger context window, or a fancier orchestration pattern. It s a three-step loop that takes five minutes to set up.Make a skill....

  • Newsletter •

    How the Claude Code Team Works

    Notes from Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) on the Y Combinator Light Cone podcast.Source: Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris ChernyI feel like there are so many nuggets in this interview...

  • Newsletter •

    Harness Engineering Has a Name Now

    September 2025. I m building what I called an AI Goalie: an agent that reads production logs on a cron job, compares them against existing GitHub issues, updates those issues with new context if...

  • Newsletter •

    The Agency Multiplier

    There s a version of the AI hiring conversation that goes: Does the candidate know how to use the tools? That s the wrong question.The right question is older. It just matters more now.Agency. The...

  • Newsletter •

    When Can You Run Claude Code Overnight, On Your Own Hardware?

    Every night around midnight I kick off parallel Claude Code agents against acceptance criteria files. By 7am there s a PR waiting. Sometimes three. The model does the work while I sleep, and most...

  • Newsletter •

    Teaching Agentic Coding to a Team

    This week I paired with one of our fastest engineers on a webhook refactor. Quick and dirty job: break a monolith endpoint into handlers, keep the abstraction thin. I pulled up Claude Code and...

  • Newsletter •

    When Your Harness Becomes Your BI Team for a Day

    Yesterday I needed to answer a question that should have been simple: How much does it cost us to serve each client? Engineering costs are scattered across seven services. Anthropic, OpenAI, MongoDB...

  • Newsletter •

    Ralph Wiggum for Teams

    This weekend I watched Ralph chew through a Telegram agent I was building for myself. Similar to my Gastown experiments but different. Seven PRs yesterday at work. Each one reviewed and merged. The...

  • Newsletter •

    Zero Trust Launch Day: Search Over Prediction

    Last month we switched our first client team from our legacy VPN to Cloudflare Zero Trust Enterprise. We knew the launch would break things. We just couldn t predict what.Zero Trust is aggressive by...

  • Newsletter •

    Orchestrate to Survive the Speed

    I ve been running 3-5 Claude Code instances in parallel for months. They re all productive. They re all stuck waiting on me.The speed isn t the problem. The speed is almost too easy to get. The...

2025

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2023

2022