A staff engineer figuring out AI-assisted development in public ... the tangents, the failures, and the learning.
This blog exists in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. You won’t find polished tutorials here. Instead: scope creep documented in real-time, refactors that went sideways, a game that probably should have been paper-prototyped first, and the slow realisation that AI changes how you work but not how hard it is.
Want a primer of what I have learnt about agentic engineering? Agentic Engineering →
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Don’t Panic…
Thirty minutes into a technical interview with the CTO of a company I’d been genuinely excited about, I watched the thing collapse in real time and there was nothing I could do about it.
When feedback arrives late, noisy, or wearing the wrong sign.
Early in my career I watched a trading engine buy the same thing, over and over, on the open market, for forty-five minutes, with nobody able to stop it.
Burn the land and boil the sea; the skills, I hope, come with me.
I wrote a while back that skills are compressions of workflow, and that importing someone else’s rarely works because you never earned the patterns underneath. It took me until this month to notice it has a blindingly obvious second edge. If you asked me to describe my own workflows, the ones I would presumably be compressing, I could not have done it.
Panic! at the SWC Compiler: cannot add pure comment to zero position.
How do you give an AI harness good guardrails? I have been poking at the question for a while. Then on a random Tuesday it stopped being theoretical, because I sat down to add observability to a web service I own.