I’m exploring how AI tools like Claude, GitHub Copilot, and others change the way we build software. This blog documents what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m learning along the way.
Expect practical posts with code, experiments, and honest takes on using AI for development.
Writing
-
Launching voice-tunnel: Talk to Your Coding Agent From Your Phone
voice-tunnel is a local CLI that gives any coding agent a two-way voice channel to your phone browser. No app, no account, no speech API, no GPU.
-
Building Your Second Brain, Part 6: Git as Durable Memory
My agent writes down what it understood me to mean. The verbatim prompt in the commit message is the only record of what I actually said.
-
GitHub Stars Are Not Evals
caveman advertised 65% token savings, a paired benchmark measured 8.5%. Both authors published real evals. A star count measures nothing about your work.
-
The Vibe Coder Liberty Paradox: Who Maintains What AI Lets Anyone Ship?
AI lets non-engineers ship software without the skills to maintain it. The engineer inherits the gap between works and works at scale, and nobody owns it.
-
Building Your Second Brain, Part 5: The Capture Loop
Most Claude + Obsidian setups sort your inbox into folders. The capture loop I use searches what I already wrote before anything gets filed.
-
Taste Debt
Technical debt lives in the code, cognitive debt in the team. Taste debt is the third kind, and AI runs it up fastest: the palate you stopped using.
-
How I Write Specs with AI
A slash command will now generate a spec from one line. The value of a spec is the thinking it forces, and a one-line prompt skips all of it.
-
The Intelligence Gap
Anthropic's most capable model was free for three days, then a US export order pulled it. The divide that matters now is how much you still babysit the model.
-
Loop Engineering for the Rest of Us
Everyone says stop prompting and write loops. But a loop is only as good as its verifier, and without unlimited tokens that verifier is the whole game.
-
Launching atref: Don't Install Skills, Mention Your Second-Brain Guides Into Any Agent
Why I reference my curated second-brain guides into Claude Code and Codex instead of packaging them as skills, and the tool I built to do it in one chord.
-
Claude Just Gave You a Dry Promotion, and Will Keep Promoting You Until...
AI promoted you from writing code to directing agents. Feels like losing your taste. It isn't, your taste moves into the evals you design.
-
14 Habits for Using Claude Code Without Wasting Tokens
14 cited habits for running Claude Code without burning tokens, published as a living, terminal-styled guide you can point Claude at.
-
Who Builds the Next Senior Engineer When AI Removes the Junior Developer Work?
AI is eating the junior developer work that used to train senior engineers. When the bottom of the ladder disappears, where do the next seniors come from?
-
Why I Built Yet Another Agent Mail Tool
agent-mail-cli is a CLI for coding agents to coordinate across harnesses. Install in one command. The agent learns it from one line.
-
AI Will Never Have Shower Thoughts, Even if it Takes a Shower
AI will never have shower thoughts, even if you give it a body. But watching it work might be giving you more of yours.
-
Usage Is Not Value
AI adoption worked. Now budgets are breaking, and usage dashboards need to connect token burn to shipped work and KPI movement.
-
The Call to Become a Super IC
AI just made one kind of engineer dramatically more valuable, and you've been training to be that kind your whole career. Time to claim it.
-
Build Your AI Writing Voice from Data You Already Have
Everyone tells you to build an AI style guide. Nobody shows how to fill it in. I mined 1,012 of my own Claude prompts for patterns I didn't know I had.
-
Stop Building Another Claude. Learn How to Effectively Onboard One Into Your Organization Instead.
The agent race is won. Your job is onboarding one into your domain, and that's what separates a rockstar AI coworker from a production outage.
-
Measuring Claude Code Adoption at the Org Level
You deployed Claude Code to your org. Now you need to know if it's being adopted. Anthropic published 5 questions; I built the dashboard that answers them.
-
Building Your Second Brain, Part 4: The Editorial Loop
AI drafts read polished, which is why the tells are hard to spot. An autonomous editorial loop, with a published checklist and prompt, catches what you can't.
-
claudefana: Beyond the Burn Rate
ccburn tracks Claude Code spend. I wanted cache efficiency, cost per commit and lines per dollar. Claude Code exports it via OpenTelemetry, so I built that.
-
Building Your Second Brain, Part 3: The Spec That Wrote This Post
AI drafts in minutes, so the bottleneck is thinking. A one-page spec sets your arc, angles and scope before AI writes a word. This post shows its own.
-
Building Your Second Brain, Part 2: When AI Moves In
My vault now has two interfaces: one for me in Obsidian, one for AI through routing tables, search tools and CLI scripts. Four practices from daily use.
-
LLMs Are Compaction Tools, and You Are the Algorithm
The compaction isn't what the model knows, it's the conversation. Your prompting, judgment and iteration compress generic AI knowledge into something valuable.
-
Give Your AI Hills to Climb
Hard artifacts let AI self-evaluate and iterate; soft judgments still need you. Build verifiable feedback into your codebase and AI can self-correct.
-
Adding Visual UIs to My MCP Server in One Evening
MCP Apps was announced on a Monday. By Tuesday I had interactive calendars and timesheet grids rendering in Claude Desktop. How Claude Code made that possible.
-
AI Accelerates Whatever You Have
AI doesn't fix teams or codebases - it amplifies what's already there. The iteration capability is solved. What's missing is measurement infrastructure.
-
How to Maximize Your Claude Code Pro/Max Plan in 2026 (Limits, Tokens, and Getting Your Money's Worth)
Hitting your Claude Code limits too fast? A practical guide to the 5-hour and weekly caps, tracking token burn, and getting more from your Pro or Max plan.
-
Introducing ccburn: A Visual Way to Track Your Claude Code Token Burn
Built a TUI tool that shows Claude Code usage as burn-up charts. Years of reading sprint burn-ups made me want the same clarity for token limits.
-
Why Engineering Managers Are Naturally Great at AI
The skills that made you a good engineering manager—clear communication, critical review, strategic delegation—are exactly what AI collaboration requires.
-
Why I'd Still Blog If No One Was Reading
Blogging is a thinking tool first, a publishing platform second. The process of writing clarifies ideas in ways that solo thinking doesn't.
-
Building an MCP Server in 3 Hours with AI
How I built tempo-filler-mcp-server using Claude and GitHub Copilot. From spec to working TypeScript in one session.
-
Making Your Second Brain AI-Compatible
Great at capturing ideas, terrible at processing them. Five years of OneNote left an inbox I couldn't use. Obsidian let AI help with the part I'm bad at.
-
Claude Code Made Me Change My Laptop's Thermal Paste
CPU throttling for months, tried everything. Claude analyzed screenshots from hwinfo-tui and found the issue hiding in the data: thermal paste failure.
-
How I Vibe Coded hwinfo-tui in Under a Day
Vibe coding the implementation took minutes. Publishing to PyPI and WinGet in under a day required hours of research and a detailed spec first.
-
The LLMphant in the Room
Authorship lives in the ideas, not the words. Why using LLMs to serialize your thinking doesn't outsource the work that actually matters.
-
Automating Social Media Posting for My Jekyll Blog
A GitHub Actions workflow that posts new blog content to X and LinkedIn automatically. No paid services, no hosting, just Node.js scripts and API calls.
-
How I Automated Post Publishing with GitHub Actions
Setting up scheduled publishing for Jekyll with GitHub Actions. Posts go live every Tuesday at 9 AM EST automatically.
-
Why I Chose GitHub Pages and Jekyll for My Blog
I looked at several static site generators and went with the default. Why Jekyll's simplicity works for a blog, plus the three plugins that handle SEO.
