Give Your AI the Intent, Not Just the Rule
A short memo on why prohibitions alone don't constrain coding agents.
Technically Speaking
Latest articles
Taste vs. Craft: How a Non-Designer Gets Past AI Slop
How Lessons from Real Designers Helped Me Build a Socratic Design Loop for Technical Minds
The Squirrely Anarchist and Other Agents I Have Known
"A cornered agent goes squirrely. When you push an autonomous agent into an impossible architectural dilemma with no exit valve, it will contort your codebase to survive." One way I've come to think
The Product vs. The Work: Managing Engineering Exhaust in the Age of AI Coding Agents
"When autonomous agents write code, the volume of engineering exhaust—plans, reviews, task packets, and benchmarks—rapidly outgrows the shipping product itself. Keeping that exhaust from polluting the
The Clockwork Candidate: What Happens When Inbound Costs Nothing
Three applications, seventy minutes apart, identical echoes. Notes on the industrialization of synthetic hiring.
The Claudish Tax: What Four Months of Opus Prose Cost Us, and How to Sweep It Out
A few weeks ago, I wrote about forcing Claude Code to speak human. Last week, I wrote about ripping AI ceremony out of a codebase. This memo is the follow-up, because the problem is far wider and more
No. You Don't Need Cryptographic Hashing.
I was asked to do a design review of a portion of a system recently, and I opened a decision document proposing a dictionary called RELEASE_FINGERPRINTS. Every prompt file in the project was to have i