Posts

• meta · 2026-07-02 What should you study in the age of AI? I don't have the answer either — so I thought it through New-grad hiring is shrinking. What should a student study? I'm not sure either — the floor is Python and vibe coding (the new Word and Excel); the ceiling isn't credentials but solving a real problem with AI.
• meta · 2026-06-30 Stop writing reports — put it in the knowledge base. Bureaucracy in the age of AI Reporting for the sake of reporting should die. A report is push — inefficient sharing. Have humans drop in raw data and an agent process it; readers pull what they need. Big companies thin to their strengths.
• meta · 2026-06-30 I didn't design it — I delegated it Someone asked how I designed the git branching for parallel agents. I didn't — I delegated it. The developer instinct 'how do I solve this' has to shift to 'how do I delegate this, and make the result trustworthy.'
• meta · 2026-06-28 The real cost of coordination files wasn't disk — it was agent context pollution We moved cross-repo coordination from files to GitHub Issues. Disk wasn't the problem. The real cost: every grep/ls pulled those files into the agent context window and burned tokens — a tax an agent pays every turn.
• infra · 2026-06-28 I set helm upgrade --timeout 10m — so why did it hang for 25 minutes? A CI helm deploy hung 25 minutes and locked the release. Why didn’t --timeout 10m kill it? helm’s --timeout bounds only the wait/hook phase, not the apiserver hang before it. The real backstop was a CI job timeout.
• meta · 2026-06-28 My review tool could approve nothing — then it caught me redteam's one-off review could never return APPROVED — a dead gate. After I fixed it, the tool caught a flaw I'd just defended as an 'improvement.' An author's certainty can't cross another provider's review.
• meta · 2026-06-27 Build in studying — learning while you build, how non-engineers make vertical AI Vertical AI shrank the distance from idea to shipping, not skill acquisition. Build with AI and even domain learning speeds up — a non-traditional career becomes raw material, though not everyone makes it.
• meta · 2026-06-26 Spend fewer tokens, spend more — both companies are half right 'Token efficiency' and 'tokenmaxxing' look opposite, but both measure token volume — the AI era's overtime hours. The real axis is productivity on the bottleneck: set a generous cap, then judge results, not token count.
• meta · 2026-06-24 The model I trusted most led me into a dead end Four stages of migrating a photo-preprocessing pipeline. The model I trusted most recommended a dead end; the answer was in none of the models but in moving between them. Automating that cross-check became redteam.
• meta · 2026-06-22 The heart of loop engineering is verification — and the verifier must be a different model Prompt → context → harness → loop engineering. The 2026 axis is the loop; its core is the verifier. A model judges its own work poorly — verify with a different agent (canon); this post argues for a different provider.