• 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 …

• The Human Job Is Choosing What Not to Build

  Coding agents have made one word much harder to say. No. You describe a feature, and the agent can already see the model, the migration, the command, the tests, and the docs it needs to touch. The whole thing sounds like an afternoon …

• When I Use a Subagent and When I Don't

  Give a good harness access to subagents and everything starts looking like a team project. You’ve got one agent working with the database layer. Another can research the API. Another can write the tests. Another can check the work. Another …

• Where Should This Agent Knowledge Live?

  Every agent has a junk drawer. It usually starts with project instructions. Then I added build commands, personal preferences, database warnings, old architecture decisions, and things to fix later. The agent could see everything if I …

• Not Every Agent Task Needs an Issue

  I’ve written before that your AI agent needs a task manager, and I stand by it. Chat history is not project state. Context windows compact. Sessions end. If the work matters tomorrow, it needs to live somewhere tomorrow’s agent can find it. …

• Tests Are Evidence, Not a Definition of Done

  I’ve watched thousands of tests run over the years. When they pass it has felt good. A huge screen of green checks in the terminal is incredibly rewarding as a software developer. But the work is never finished. The tests are always …

• Every Feature Opens a Maintenance Account

  Coding agents have developed a dangerous little habit. You ask for one change, and somewhere near the end they offer to add three more. Would you like a configuration flag? A JSON output mode? A retry option? Maybe a dashboard while we’re …

• Code Is Cheap Now. Decisions Aren't

  I’ve spent a lot of time working on software backlogs with coding agents. Pick an issue, inspect the code, make the change, run the tests, close it, move to the next one. The strange part is how often writing the code is no longer the hard …

• Pi and Hermes Are Trying to Solve Different Problems

  I went looking for a talk from Mario Zechner, the creator of Pi, because I wanted to understand why someone would build another coding agent when we already have a pile of them. I found: a talk called “Building pi in a World of Slop.” …