Latest AI / Software Engineering
Before You Build an AI Harness, Become the Harness
Before building software around an LLM, manually provide the tools and context it would have. The interventions reveal whether the workflow deserves a harness.
17 articles
Software Engineering
Architecture, systems design, developer workflows and the practice of building software that lasts.
More in Software Engineering
Startups 9 min read
Cuegence Postmortem — Part III: Great Engineering Problems Don’t Make Great Businesses
Cuegence never failed, because we never built it. Part 3: the budget line, the replacement question, and why great engineering problems aren't great businesses.
Startups 10 min read
Cuegence Postmortem — Part II: Six Schools and an Uncomfortable Answer
Three pivots, six calls with the people who actually sign purchase orders, one question: is this a budget line? Part 2 of the Cuegence postmortem.
Startups 7 min read
Cuegence Postmortem — Part I: I Fell in Love With the Engineering Problem
Curriculum graphs, evidence provenance, memory decay — a genuinely beautiful engineering problem. Part 1: how that beauty replaced the question of who would pay.
AI 14 min read
My Agentic Web Development Setup Is Basically a `while True` Loop
A multi-model web development pipeline — research, design, implementation, review — eventually orchestrated by a boring Python while True loop.
AI 16 min read
AI Feels Faster. The Data Is Less Certain.
AI coding tools feel transformative, but the productivity evidence is mixed. Part 2: perceived speed vs measured outcomes, and why review is the bottleneck.
AI 16 min read
AI-Native Software Engineering Isn’t About AI
AI-native engineering isn't about how much AI you use. It's a development model where AI is a primary participant in building software, not an assistant.
AI 18 min read
The Future of Software Engineering Is an Operating Model
AI-native engineering isn't about removing humans. Part 5: how roles, teams, economics and accountability shift when implementation stops being the main work.
AI 19 min read
The Model Is Only One Part of the System
A useful AI workflow takes more than a better prompt. Part 3: specifications, context engineering, agent workflows, and the harness that enforces boundaries.
AI 18 min read
When Agents Scale, Coordination Becomes the Product
One agent can misunderstand a requirement; several misunderstand it differently. Part 4: coordination, multi-agent orchestration and verification at scale.
AI 16 min read
The Model Is Not the Development Environment
I spent 12 million input tokens on a small monorepo change. The problem was not the model. It was the development environment around it.
AI 11 min read
AI Speeds Up Coding, Not Engineering
An opinionated workflow for building good-enough software with AI coding agents without surrendering architecture, judgment, or security.
Software Engineering 11 min read
I Couldn't Become a 10x Developer
Chasing 10x across six projects, several languages and a pile of AI agents — and the quiet realization that 1.5x is honest work.
Software Engineering 13 min read
We Abused POST for Years. HTTP QUERY Is the Apology.
Complex read-only queries have hidden inside POST /search for years. The HTTP QUERY method is safe, idempotent, and built for body-heavy reads.
Software Engineering 6 min read
Stop Cloning the Same Repo Again and Again. Git Worktrees Exist.
Stop cloning the same repo for every context switch. Git worktrees give you several branches at once — no WIP commits, no broken dependencies, no clutter.
Software Engineering 11 min read
Why Is Laravel So Underrated?
Laravel gets dismissed as outdated PHP, yet it still ships serious business applications faster than most modern stacks. Why it's still my backend default.
Software Engineering 6 min read
I Built a Tiny Task Tracker Because Jira Was Too Much for My Animation Team
When Jira, ClickUp and OpenProject overwhelmed a non-technical creative team, I built a small app focused on backlog pull, visibility and simplicity.
