I’m Tired of Talking to AI
I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. […]
Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
Claude Code is one of those tools where the difference between a casual user and someone who has internalized it is enormous. The casual user types prompts, accepts suggestions, and treats it like a fancier autocomplete. The daily driver uses it like a programmable agent with memory, custom commands, parallel sessions, and a project setup […]
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability). We can think of this as […]
Where does next-token prediction leave us?
Table of Contents Solved/Cooked The Meta-Contract How Did We Get Here? What’s Left? Solved/Cooked AI maximalists in some corners of the internet hate it when people refer to LLMs as just “next-token predictors” or “stochastic parrots”. It is instinctively taken as a pejorative. They use the words “solved” or “cooked” to signal the end of […]
Stripe is friendly to ”friendly fraud”
Friendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of signals. I had a customer buy my product twice. It’s called Ciglue. It’s cigar glue. […]
Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist whose name and work you may recognize from the Oscar-winning movie Erin Brockovich, has created a tool to map data centers across the country, along with a form for people to report data centers and their impacts in their community. “The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by […]
Agent Memory: An Anatomy
every agent memory library uses the same words: episodic, semantic, sometimes procedural. they’re cognitive science’s vocabulary, lifted into the API. the engineering often isn’t lifted with them. a library can have a procedural field that uses the same storage and retrieval as semantic — a label, not a separate system. the deeper slip is the […]
AI Tools Are Only as Good as Your Judgment – and That’s the Point
There’s a quiet anxiety spreading through engineering teams right now: Am I becoming dependent on AI? Is my judgment atrophying? My take: that’s the wrong question. The right one is whether you’re using AI in a way that sharpens your judgment or replaces it. Those are genuinely different modes of use, and most engineers drift […]
Cloudflare Flagship
Ship features safely with feature flags. Flagship is Cloudflare’s feature flag service. It lets you control feature visibility in your applications without redeploying code. Define flags with targeting rules and percentage-based rollouts, then evaluate them directly inside your Workers through a native binding. OpenFeature ↗ is the CNCF open standard for feature flag management. Flagship […]
The worst job interview I ever had
The worst job interview I ever had wasn’t a knowledge meltdown, coding assessment failure, or a complete language misunderstanding with the interviewer (although I’ve had all of those, too). No, the worst job interview I had was something I can only describe as an unsolicited psych evaluation. I’m an engineer, primarily working for small startups. […]