AI
-
Attempting to reverse engineer code review
→: Attempting to reverse engineer code reviewI keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness? Frustration? “AI slop” is the new “I didn’t like it.” Code review was always…
-
Is the software factory working?
→: Is the software factory working?When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means there’s a lot of activity, and every release I cut (several a week) includes a list of changes. But I need to know if the factory is working.…
-
Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
→: Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I WorkIn February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask “how did I do?” and “what can I learn?” Nine months in, I’m still doing it. And with that…
-
What do managers even do now?
→: What do managers even do now?I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think…
-
Skills for a more leveraged workflow
→: Skills for a more leveraged workflowI’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important…
-
Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
→: Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person teamWe’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We’ve come a long way since it was just Jean and “Claude the intern”, but mostly very iteratively. We’d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We…
-
Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
→: Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built…
-
The Value of Getting Closer to the Work
→: The Value of Getting Closer to the WorkScaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that – so that things are understandable, knowable. It’s turning “tribal knowledge” into documentation, automation, and process. It used to be that only the automation was for the machine, but now documentation is machine…
-
WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blog
→: WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blogIf you’re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I’m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I came into this confident. I used to work on WordPress (admittedly, the mobile apps – but I did the support rotations and lived in P2 like everyone else). I have…