• Start With Ten Tasks You Actually Do

  Public benchmarks of large language models are a fine way to compare models in the abstract, but they’re close to useless for answering questions about things that actually matter. Generally, it’s helpful to know which model is the best in …

• `updated_at` Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Strategy

  In the last post we talked about the problems with a distributed system, and touched on the fact that timestamps are not as reliable as you think they are. If you have two updated_at fields and you compare them, how do you decide which side …

• The Moment You Add Sync, You Have a Distributed System

  How do you keep two sets of data in sync? Like, by definition, you now have a distributed system. It could be something simple, syncing files or talking with a remote service somewhere. Maybe it’s not a lot of code. Initially, it might not …

• Your Local File Should Not Have to Argue With Your Database

  Sync bugs usually all start the same way. Two copies of something, both of them mostly right, and no written rule about which one wins. The problems occur when you don’t notice The bug. When the file says one thing and the database says …

• The Decision Log: A Lightweight Artifact for Agentic Coding

  Coding agents are remarkably good at reopening decisions you already made. Imagine a content pipeline where posts live as local Markdown files and a database holds the scheduling metadata. You open a fresh session. Which one does the agent …

• Run Your Whole Agent Stack on a $5 Box

  I SSH’d into my home server this afternoon and ran docker stats on the memory layer that every one of my coding agent sessions talks to. Here’s what came back: mem0-qdrant 28.09MiB / 60.75GiB 2.13% mem0-neo4j 612.7MiB / 60.75GiB 0.77% 640 …

• If I Worked at Apple Again, I'd Build iApps

  I worked as a contractor at Apple more than a decade ago. The specific work doesn’t matter, but if I walked back through the doors today, I know what I’d pitch. Call them iApps, just as a thought experiment. An iApp would be a small …

• Your Agent Needs a Dollar Limit, Not a Token Budget

  If you let an autonomous coding agent run in an unbounded loop, I have bad news for you, or rather, your wallet. It happens easily. An agent gets handed a task, runs into an unhandled error or a failing test, and gets stuck in a retry loop. …

• How I Would Build Observability for an Autonomous Agent

  I have not built a full production observability stack for an autonomous agent. I’ve built lots of small wrappers around existing coding harnesses. I have a pretty good idea how quickly their output can turn into a wall of model responses, …

• Your Justfile Is Your Repo's API

  Ask your agent to run the tests in a repo it has never seen before and watch what happens. It’s gonna load so many things into the context to try to figure it out, digging through the repo to find the right command and what framework you’re …