Productivity

Tools Full comparisons and context in my 2026 AI tech stack post. This is just what you need installed to follow the workflow below. Claude Code If you’re new, start with the cheat sheet and Anthropic best practices. Security — set this up first: Claude Code Security Hooks — 7-layer prompt injection defence, read guards, canary files Lock down your .env and any git-secret files in .claude/settings.local.json before anything else MCP: Context7 — library/API docs on demand DeepWiki — open source repo documentation Skills: ...

Introduction In some ways, a lot has changed since my last post, and in other ways, not much has changed. There has been a big shift in the last 12 months, especially toward “agentic engineering” and how we run multi-agent AFK setups vs HITL as we have been. I touched on this in my introduction to the tool I’m working on as well, which, spoiler, is part of my toolchain. Kinda. It’s a WIP… ...

Introduction I keep saying my next post won’t be about AI, and then inevitably, I post something about AI. It’s hard to ignore, it’s the big bubble we are dealing with, and there is so much hype that needs to be ignored and filtered so we can get to the actually good stuff… I’ve been playing around with various tools over the last 3 or 4 months, and I think I’ve settled into what I find to be most useful for me. And while the topic says no-one asked, truth is, this actually does come up in a few discussions on other platforms and groups I’m part of, so I figured I’d love to share, but more importantly, hear what others are doing and why you agree or disagree with me. ...

Over a year ago a wrote a post about how I felt that, even though ChatGPT was making me more productive, I also felt it was making me lazier and dumber. Since then, I’ve been a lot more intentional about how I use AI tools, in particular generative AI tools and coding assistants. It should be a multiplier, not a replacement or crutch, which is something I see juniors and non-developers struggle with the most, but clearly we can all fall prey too. ...

LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...

Right, so it’s been a minute since I last posted something. Like many other companies this last year, we weren’t spared layoffs. While I still have my job, my team has been greatly reduced, both from people leaving when they saw the signs and from people being let go. So while fighting survivors guilt and an increased workload, posting hasn’t been my first priority. But while doing my day to day and trying to keep my head down and deliver as much as possible as quickly as possible, I noticed something. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than we need to talk about it. ...

Just a quick one here, but I used this a lot today and realised after chatting to some other devs that a lot of people don’t know about this trick. That trick is: History Expansion Let’s say you are SSH’d (or SSM’d on AWS if you want to be more secure) onto a Linux box and you want check the status of a service with systemctl status cassandra.service You see that the service is exited for some reason, and you want to restart it after determining that’s all that is needed. ...

A while back I posted my first blog post, and the key take-away it seems people had from that was that “intentional learning” is key growing in your career and profession. The discussions I had following this made me think of another conversation I had with a new developer I recently hired. He noticed on my LinkedIn that I have a LOT of completed courses, and asked how I go about learning this much and if what I learn sticks. I gave him a brief overview, but thinking about things over the last week, I figured I could probably share more. ...