I was my own worst gatekeeper until I realised that engineering isn't about credentials, it's about how I approach building software.

It's a strange feeling knowing that you can create anything, and I'm starting to wonder if there's a seventh stage to the "people stages of AI adoption by software developers" whereby that seventh stage is essentially this scene in the matrix... It's where you deeply understand that 'you can now

I just finished up a phone call with a "stealth startup" that was pitching an idea that agents could generate code securely via an MCP server. Needless to say, the phone call did not go well. What fol...

It's a meme as accurate as time. The problem is that our digital infrastructure depends upon just some random guy in Nebraska. Open-source, by design, is not financially sustainable. Finding reliable...

😎The following was developed last month and has already been delivered at two conferences. If you would like for me to run a workshop similar to this at your employer, please get in contact. Hey ever...

This blog post intends to be a definitive guide to context engineering fundamentals from the perspective of an engineer who builds commercial coding assistants and harnesses for a living. Just two we...

It's a meme as accurate as time. The problem is that our digital infrastructure depends upon just some random guy in Nebraska. Open-source, by design, is not financially sustainable. Finding reliable...

It might surprise some folks, but I'm incredibly cynical when it comes to AI and what is possible; yet I keep an open mind. That said, two weeks ago, when I was in SFO, I discovered another thing that...

It's another day, and another coding tool has been brought to market that uses ripgrep under the hood. This time it's Kiro by Amazon. What follows below is an analysis of this coding agent: Study the...

Something I've been wondering about for a really long time is, essentially, why do people say AI doesn't work for them? What do they mean when they say that? From which identity are they coming from?...

If you've seen my socials lately, you might have seen me talking about Ralph and wondering what Ralph is. Ralph is a technique. In its purest form, Ralph is a Bash loop. while :; do cat PROMPT.md | n...

So I'm currently over in San Francisco. I've been here for almost two weeks now. I'll be heading home to my family in a couple of days. But over the weekend, I had the opportunity to drop into the Com...

Welcome back to our final session at WebDirections. We're definitely on the glide path—though I'm not sure if we're smoothly landing, about to hit turbulence, or perhaps facing a go-around. We'll see ...

💀🔥 OBLITERATE THE TYPOGRAPHY ESTABLISHMENT 💀🔥 A Chrome extension that transforms any website into a beautiful Comic Sans masterpiece - ghuntley/piss-off-all-designers-in-the-world

Ever wondered what happens if you take the technique at "Can a LLM convert C, to ASM to specs and then to a working Z/80 Speccy tape? Yes." and run it against the Atasslian Command Line (ACLI) interfa...

Just yesterday morning, I was writing a conference talk on best practices for maintaining the LLM context window, which was quite detailed. It contained the then best practices from the two blog posts...

This is a follow-up from my previous blog post: deliberate, intentional play. I didn't want to get into the distinction between skilled and unskilled work because people take offence to it, but AI is a matter of skill. Someone can be highly experienced as a software engineer in 2024, but that does not mean they're skilled as a software engineer in 2025, now that AI is here. In my view, LLMs are essentially mirrors. They mirror the skill of the operator. how do identify skill One of the most