Writing
Loud Versus Costly Decisions
Attention usually goes to whatever is loudest.
Skill Is The Axis AI Compresses
Skill is the axis almost every hiring and promotion decision runs on. It is also the axis AI is compressing fastest.
Cognitive Endurance Is The Limit
Typing speed is no longer the limit, but your cognitive endurance.
Go Find The Problem
One of the biggest constraints on delivery is not capacity. It is people waiting for someone else to clear their blocker.
What I Learned Getting Married in Armenia
Samira and I got married in Yerevan in August. Armenia was the fast part. The documents from home, the translations, and one clerk who would not speak English were everything else.
Vibe Coding Is A Slur
Vibe Coding is a slur
Quality Nobody Owns
Who owns quality of delivery?
Depth Is What AI Does Not Cover
Job titles describe the work less and less.
Hoarding the interesting work
The problem I find most interesting is the one I should hand to someone else.
Senior work is decisions not hours
Right now senior engineer level, job already changed. You stop getting paid mainly own hours work. You get paid decisions you make systems you set up keep…
Opinionated Codebase
If you want to get great results, you need to set your project up for agentic success.
Make It Write a Skill
If your agent figured something out once, make it write it down.
New laptop in thirty minutes
A new work laptop usually means a day of reinstalling and reconfiguring. Mine was ready for real work in about 30 minutes.
Pre-assemble the context
Don't give an agent MCP tools and hope it fetches the right context. Pre-assemble the context deterministically and put it straight in the prompt.
Tech debt is melting
Everyone worries that AI is burying us in tech debt. In our codebase the opposite is happening. Tech debt is melting.
The cheapest item on the motivation list
Your outcome depends on how well you communicate your mission.
GLM off-peak rush
Trying to finish off 6 sessions of GLM agents before off-peak discount (-50% cost) ends at 2 PM Beijing time. Always a rush in the early morning 🙈
Seniors cannot delegate
I think some senior engineers struggle with delegation to agents more than non-engineers.
What you enjoy predicts how you feel about AI
I think what you enjoy about the work predicts how you feel about AI.
Outsource the typing, not the deciding
Bro, form your own opinion before you let AI near it.
Does this alert need a response?
Do you get alarms and notifications that you find not actionable?
Handmade is mostly a story
We tell ourselves handmade means better. Most of the time, it doesn't.
Claude will watermark your slop
Seems Claude will soon watermark your AI s̶l̶o̶p̶ content.
We use AI tells you nothing
"We use AI" tells you almost nothing about how a team works.
The Steam Deck Black Screen Is Fixable
My Steam Deck sat empty for weeks and then refused to turn on, even after hours on the charger. It is not dead. It is a stuck BIOS, and one button combination brings it back.
"Retrieve more: hash" in Claude Code is Headroom compression
Claude Code shows "items compressed to" with a "Retrieve more: hash" marker, or a <<ccr>> tag, then claims it cannot read the file. That is Headroom context compression. Tell it to call headroom_retrieve.
Error messages are instructions
Error messages are instructions. Both for humans as well as agents.
Automating work that should not exist
The most expensive thing AI does is let you automate work that should not exist.
Every AI Workflow Is a Verification Loop
Every AI workflow needs to run the same loop: generate, then check, then fix if the check fails.
Free Attractions in Istanbul
Istanbul feels overpriced and some of it is an outright scam. The good part of the city is free. A long list, every entry linked to Google Maps.
Instrument your agents
If you run automated AI agent sessions, instrument them.
Who Signs Off Matters More
You are paid for your accountability, not your execution.
When Claude Code forgets your MCP servers
Claude Code started telling me it had no access to MCP servers I use every day. It would claim GitLab or Slack were not connected, even though the tools…
Design for Delegation Not Participation
Too many agentic products waste your time by keeping you watching.
Raise the Baseline
People optimize for peak moments. But I think that's usually backwards.
Routing z.ai GLM Through Headroom in opencode
A short tutorial for adding a z.ai GLM coding model (GLM-5.2) to opencode, routed through the Headroom proxy so requests still get context compression.
Stop complaining automate it
Stop complaining and just start automating it. You don't need the automation to be good. You need it to be able to get better.
Filing is the bottleneck
Filing the work is now harder than doing it.
Raise the Floor of Capability
The bottleneck for smart, non-technical people who want to build with AI is not intelligence. It is setup.
The ceiling is your imagination
Fable is not as good as you thought. But maybe the problem is the user.
Forget what school taught you
The first step to getting good at anything is forgetting what school taught you.
Bugs that fix themselves
Why is your setup not auto-healing? Why are your bugs not fixing themselves yet?
AI cannot write in my voice
I gave my agent hundreds of thousands of words of my own writing. It still cannot draft a paragraph I would recognize as mine.