Development

Most of my life I used Windows for gaming, and Linux for development. When I started my first full time job in 2007, they gave me a Windows desktop for Java dev, and I hated it… In 2010 they added a BYOC policy and two devs I worked with convinced me to buy my first ever Mac, and since then, that’s what I’ve been using. Mainly because I dialed in my perfect setup early, and migrating an old Mac to a new Mac is super easy, and once I got my iPad and eventually settled on iPhone (after jumping between that and Android every 2 years for a while), I was locked into the ecosystem, and no matter how much it gets enshittified, I just haven’t been able to migrate away (and I’ve tried, quite a few times). ...

I was on LinkedIn this morning making a quick post about my experience with Omarchy, and then this showed up in my feed. “Local dev setup makes zero sense to me now.” It’s a comment from Matt Pocock, who we all know by now, the TypeScript educator, creator of the /grill-me skill that half the industry has been grilled by at this point (including myself), with a clip from The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. The post goes on: every dev has a hundred terminals, those terminals should be available to your whole organisation, available from everywhere. So for him that means he’s on a train chatting to his Hetzner box in Discord, and therefore an expensive laptop feels like wasted compute. ...

Previous posts for context: The Future of AI Coding is Directing and C.A.S.T Progress: First Blood Last time I had one event flowing from a ticket board to a NATS topic. That was the plumbing. This time the plumbing has something running through it: a ticket goes in one end as a one-line wish, and a reviewed, merged, cleaned-up branch comes out the other. No human types a line of code in between. ...

Previous post for context: The Future of AI Coding is Directing. Let Me Introduce You to Your C.A.S.T. Also, this banner was generated by ChatGPT and whatever model they are using at the moment, and I’m kinda impress, NGL. When I wrote about C.A.S.T last month, the design was solid but unproven. I had a SPEC, ADRs, hire/fire scripts, and a lot of conviction. What I didn’t have was a single event flowing from a ticket board to a NATS topic to a waiting agent. ...

Previous post for context: Two AI Agents Walk Into a Codebase If you look at social media, everyone will tell you that most people are still using AI like a very fast keyboard. You write what you want, it writes the code, you review it, you move on. Faster, sure. But you’re still in the driver’s seat for every line, every file, every decision. They will also tell you that the future is not that. The future is swarms of AI agents doing the work of 100s of people. And I mostly agree. The shift that’s actually happening — and I say this as someone who’s spent the last month living inside it — is from writing code to directing agents. ...

🧠 Something I’ve been thinking about a lot after doing these AI coding experiments… I get why non-devs enjoy this so much. Creating something cool gives you a dopamine hit. Solving a problem does it too. Just like how YT Shorts, IG Reels, TikTok and even LinkedIn these days give you these hits through scrolling, these AI tools do it by “doing, showing, doing, showing”. ...

I’ve been playing around with Cursor and Windsurf, because I keep seeing on social media how great these tools are and how easy it is to build things. And you know what? It’s…. ummm… better than before? Okay, look, it’s impressive. If I compare it so some earlier versions of the IDEs and other tools like Bolt.new, sure, it’s improved. But sheesh, does it take poking and prodding and coddling to get somewhere. Maybe I’m using it wrong, I don’t know, but I wish I could share the transcripts of my chats with these tools so you’ll understand… (can I export those? am I missing a feature somewhere?) ...

🧩 I fell into a trap. One I’m often warning others not to fall into. Two of them, actually. 💻 The solution I’m building for one client isn’t necessarily a hard problem. There are existing solutions, but we want a simple MVP at lowest cost, so most paid services are off the table. With our custom integration needs, we decided to roll most of it ourselves. No, this wasn’t the trap. ...