Writing
Testing For 2019
If you're still banning AI in your take-home, you're testing for 2019.
AI Did Not Make Bad Developers Good
AI didn't make bad developers good, it made their habits faster.
Agents Sell The UX Of Your Data
Agents are selling you the UX of using your data and making it more useful.
Read Your Own Interview Transcripts
If you do screening calls, read your own transcripts with AI.
Cursor On The Side Is The Bottom Now
If you only use Cursor a bit with a chat now and then, you are probably at the bottom of AI adoption right now.
No Moat Is Not My Problem
Steve Eisman, the investor from The Big Short, says the AI labs have no moat. He is right. For anyone who builds software with AI, that is good news.
Scrum Was Built For Scarce Engineering Time
Scrum was built for a world where engineering time is scarce, and I don't think we live in that world anymore.
Just Adapt Is Not An Answer
I think "Just adapt" is not good enough as career advice for engineers.
Loud Versus Costly Decisions
Attention usually goes to whatever is loudest.
The Reviewer Should Try To Break It
A reviewer that trusts the author's own summary is not a review.
Skill Is The Axis AI Compresses
Skill is the axis almost every hiring and promotion decision runs on. It is also the axis AI is compressing fastest.
Cognitive Endurance Is The Limit
Typing speed is no longer the limit, but your cognitive endurance.
Go Find The Problem
One of the biggest constraints on delivery is not capacity. It is people waiting for someone else to clear their blocker.
What I Learned Getting Married in Armenia
Samira and I got married in Yerevan in August. Armenia was the fast part. The documents from home, the translations, and one clerk who would not speak English were everything else.
Vibe Coding Is A Slur
Vibe Coding is a slur
Quality Nobody Owns
Who owns quality of delivery?
Depth Is What AI Does Not Cover
Job titles describe the work less and less.
Hoarding the interesting work
The problem I find most interesting is the one I should hand to someone else.
Senior work is decisions not hours
Right now at a senior engineer level, your job already changed. You stop getting paid mainly for your own hours of work. You get paid for the decisions you…
Opinionated Codebase
If you want to get great results, you need to set your project up for agentic success.
Make It Write a Skill
If your agent figured something out once, make it write it down.
New laptop in thirty minutes
A new work laptop usually means a day of reinstalling and reconfiguring. Mine was ready for real work in about 30 minutes.
Pre-assemble the context
Don't give an agent MCP tools and hope it fetches the right context. Pre-assemble the context deterministically and put it straight in the prompt.
Tech debt is melting
Everyone worries that AI is burying us in tech debt. In our codebase the opposite is happening. Tech debt is melting.
The cheapest item on the motivation list
Your outcome depends on how well you communicate your mission.
Seniors cannot delegate
I think some senior engineers struggle with delegation to agents more than non-engineers.
What you enjoy predicts how you feel about AI
I think what you enjoy about the work predicts how you feel about AI.
Outsource the typing, not the deciding
Bro, form your own opinion before you let AI near it.
Does this alert need a response?
Do you get alarms and notifications that you find not actionable?
Handmade is mostly a story
We tell ourselves handmade means better. Most of the time, it doesn't.
We use AI tells you nothing
"We use AI" tells you almost nothing about how a team works.
The Steam Deck Black Screen Is Fixable
My Steam Deck sat empty for weeks and then refused to turn on, even after hours on the charger. It is not dead. It is a stuck BIOS, and one button combination brings it back.
"Retrieve more: hash" in Claude Code is Headroom compression
Claude Code shows "items compressed to" with a "Retrieve more: hash" marker, or a <<ccr>> tag, then claims it cannot read the file. That is Headroom context compression. Tell it to call headroom_retrieve.
Error messages are instructions
Error messages are instructions. Both for humans as well as agents.
Automating work that should not exist
The most expensive thing AI does is let you automate work that should not exist.
Every AI Workflow Is a Verification Loop
Every AI workflow needs to run the same loop: generate, then check, then fix if the check fails.
Free Attractions in Istanbul
Istanbul feels overpriced and some of it is an outright scam. The good part of the city is free. A long list, every entry linked to Google Maps.
Instrument your agents
If you run automated AI agent sessions, instrument them.
Who Signs Off Matters More
You are paid for your accountability, not your execution.
When Claude Code forgets your MCP servers
Claude Code started telling me it had no access to MCP servers I use every day. It would claim GitLab or Slack were not connected, even though the tools…
Design for Delegation Not Participation
Too many agentic products waste your time by keeping you watching.
Raise the Baseline
People optimize for peak moments. But I think that's usually backwards.
Routing z.ai GLM Through Headroom in opencode
A short tutorial for adding a z.ai GLM coding model (GLM-5.2) to opencode, routed through the Headroom proxy so requests still get context compression.
Stop complaining automate it
Stop complaining and just start automating it. You don't need the automation to be good. You need it to be able to get better.
Filing is the bottleneck
Filing the work is now harder than doing it.
Raise the Floor of Capability
The bottleneck for smart, non-technical people who want to build with AI is not intelligence. It is setup.
The ceiling is your imagination
Fable is not as good as you thought. But maybe the problem is the user.
Forget what school taught you
The first step to getting good at anything is forgetting what school taught you.
Bugs that fix themselves
Why is your setup not auto-healing? Why are your bugs not fixing themselves yet?
AI cannot write in my voice
I gave my agent hundreds of thousands of words of my own writing. It still cannot draft a paragraph I would recognize as mine.