Engineering Blog

Will it Blend was a series of videos promoting a blender brand, in which various unlikely objects were put in a blender to see if they would blend.

I made a prototype and let it sit for over two months. why? attention is all i need - focus can be frustrating, because i can't do the other things, but it is also what lets me enjoy holidays and get good results out of my work.

It is a bit over three months ago that my linkedin post about cancelling my Claude Max subscription went viral. Time for an update. The first six weeks were uneventful, then I started missing some things from before, and yesterday I closed the loop.

At first I was bemused by Retort, Adrian Cockroft's whole stack coding agent evaluation tool. It is growing on me, and might be useful as a starting point for custom evals.

Every application has some kind of workflow. Understanding larger workflows, making them cohesive and understandable to users and developers is non-trivial. I re-discovered Ward Cunningham's Swim the Test approach, this is the Further Reading section of future posts.

I am making small contributions to tiny open source projects I have just started using, where I would let it be before coding agents.

Synthetic Test Driven Development is when you have a coding agent generate the tests and the code, and maybe also do the refactor step with an agent.

I don't like what I now call Moralistic Programming. 'You are not a good developer if <you don't use my pet favourite practice>'. I see some of that resurfacing in discussions around coding agents. I value Situational Awareness over best practices and fingerpointing..

Next annoying variation in my blog writing workflow is adding images to a post. I wanted to add drag and drop. I let a coding agent generate something that almost worked, and then did the finishing touches by hand, simplifying the UX and code as I went.

Brian Marick once distributed stickers with 'An example would be handy right about now'. This is also handy in cases where writing a test is not directly obvious