Articles
24 posts tagged "For Engineers"
Inside a Claude Skill: The Eight Steps That Build the Red Dot skill
I open the hood on the Claude Skill that builds mirror assessments — the eight-step pipeline, the single spec it compiles, and the checker that won't ship broken.
How to Tell If Your Scoreboard Is Lying to You
A pizza shop's flyer contest shows why your AI scoreboard can climb while the work gets worse - and why a measure that can't be gamed is the real job.
The Key Comes Before the Song
When you build with AI doing the content generation, the obvious move is QA at the end. But if that's your whole strategy, you sat down at the piano without picking a key. Here's how I'm thinking about evals for a new product — and why guardrails belong upstream, not downstream.
Stop Selling a Privacy Policy
When both sides have IP, current AI privacy answers force one of them to bleed. The fix isn't a better policy or a clever cryptographic trick. It's a design discipline: stop protecting what crosses the wire and start designing what's allowed to cross in the first place.
The 4 scans I run before I'm done with any AI-assisted project
There are no magic prompts. But there are four scans I run after every first pass on AI-assisted code: race conditions, concurrency, idempotency, and dead code. Each one catches issues you'd otherwise debug months later.
The harness is the craft.
Most engineers pick a model they trust, eyeball a couple of runs, and ship. I don't ship that way. Here's what eval-driven development actually looks like, and the seven principles I'd hand to anyone shipping LLM systems.
What Is a Claude Skill? Let's Look Closely at One.
A Claude Skill teaches AI to work the way you want, not the average way. Here's a walkthrough of one I built (Expert Profiler) and the install pattern you can reuse for any technical setup.
Why Your AI Bill Is Too High (And the Architecture Fix That Saves 40%)
Most companies run their AI like a doctor's office. The ones that scale run it like an ER. Here's the architecture decision that cuts AI costs by 40%.
The CRM I built this weekend doesn't have a UI. Agentic Software is the future.
I built a CRM this weekend with no UI. Just tools an AI agent can call. Here's why agentic software is the next decade of building.
Your AI agents have one job each. Most builders give them four.
Most multi-agent systems fail for the same architectural reason: LLMs get wired into four positions when they only belong in three. Here's the rule that fixes it.
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