How a Team's AI Coding Flow Should Be Wired
A change lands in review with everything green. The rules pass, the types check, the tests are close to the ones I'd have asked for.
Tagged agent-design
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The Other Intent
The business intent, what we're accomplishing, goes in the PR description. Solved problem; we've had a text box for it since forever.
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The Agent Will Invent the Bar
One evening an agent working in this repo killed an idea of mine for failing a rule. The kill was well argued and it cited the rule by line number, the way…
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A Pipeline Is What It Refuses to Forward
The first stage of my code reviewer hands the next one a two-field object: a rule id and a citation. Not its reasoning. Not the file it just read. Two fields.
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Correct Is Not Usable
I asked an agent which of three approaches to take. It gave me three — each described accurately, tradeoffs and costs and failure modes, all of it right.
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Build the Operator, Keep the Operands as Data
A good rule set grows. Mine has grown — tested against a whole corpus of real PRs and code — into something too big to hand a model all at once, and that's…
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The Harness Is the Product
The reviewer is the visible product: it reads a diff, applies a rule corpus tested against real PRs and code, and ships the findings worth a person's attention.
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The Raw Is the Trust Boundary
Ask a model to summarise a document and you can hold the result against the document — the raw is right there.
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Keep the Factory, Ship the Result
I built an eval to tell me whether my agent's skills were earning their place. For a while it said they weren't — clean, green, confident.
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A Big Rule Set Is an Attention Problem
Sixteen minutes and sixteen dollars to surface four low-severity nits, most of it spent scanning for rules rather than judging code.
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Where the Reps Come From
Advice to keep reading assumes you built the judgment first. If AI writes the first draft, the cohort coming up is asked to keep what it never built.
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The Agent Reaches for the Nearest Metaphor
I had a figure I liked. Writing about giving the AI the why instead of the what, I'd reached for a bespoke image — mine, a little odd, exactly the shape of…
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Fidelity Was a Vibe, Cost Was a Number
I told the agent fidelity came first. It optimised for cost anyway, for an embarrassing reason — cost had an estimator and a guardrail, and fidelity had a…
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Noticing Is Cheap, Judgment Is Scarce
The goal was never a cheaper reviewer. It was finding everything that is really there while posting nothing that isn't — and that objective, not the budget…
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Your Skills Are a Codebase, Not a Junk Drawer
I asked the agent to review a diff. Two skills woke up and started fighting over whose job it was.
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Skills are one-offs. If you want an ecosystem, you need plugins.
You wrote a skill. It's good. Now you want it to lean on another skill — call it, require it, ship the two together so installing yours pulls in the one it…
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"Context Debt" Is a Strawman
Here's the pitch, and it's a good one. Vibe-coded slop is only the symptom; the disease underneath is context debt — the steady loss of what the code means…
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Your Codebase Is the Prompt
The AI reads from your codebase before it writes into it. Whatever's already there — your conventions, your shortcuts, your best work and your worst — is the…
