Category
AI
Reading paths
Read end to end.
Greenfield
Engineering, AI, and the businesses we build from scratch. Solo-narrated essay episodes on the rules, layers, and judgment calls behind working with coding agents in real codebases.
Start →Agent-ready React
An ongoing series on making legacy React codebases ready for AI coding agents — from CLAUDE.md and rules to hooks, subagents, and skills.
Start →Choosing Your AI Stack
A six-part series on picking models, pricing models, and building workflows that aren't locked to any single provider.
Start →AI Tooling for Developers
A seven-part guide to the agent ecosystem beyond your coding IDE — MCP vs CLI tradeoffs, Jira/Notion integrations, release note automation, Paperclip, OpenClaw, and Hermes.
Start →Browse all series →
See every reading path on the site.
- ·3 min read
Workflow vs Agent Team: Two Ways to Run Many Claudes
Once you're spawning subagents, you hit a fork: let the lead agent decide who to spawn and when, or script the orchestration deterministically up front. They feel similar and fail differently. Here's how I pick.
- ·3 min read
The Subagent I Deleted: A Field Note on Layer Discipline
I wrote a subagent that worked. I deleted it ten days later. The replacement was three lines of Prettier config. A short note on the wrong-layer trap, the four-questions test, and why a mature agent-ready repo isn't the one with the most artifacts in it.
- ·3 min read
Installing Isn't Teaching: What I Learned From Auditing My Own Shell History
I asked Claude what new CLI tools I should install based on my last week of shell history. The honest answer wasn't a list of tools — it was that I'd already installed half the modern tools I needed and was still typing `cat` and `cd` like it was 2010. A short note on the gap between *having* a tool and *reaching* for one, and where that same gap shows up in your `CLAUDE.md`.
- ·3 min read
Skills: The User-Facing Workflow Layer
Hooks enforce rules. Subagents review work. Commands and skills are how the team actually invokes them — thin wrappers route to detailed workflows, encoding multi-step knowledge in a single, memorable slash command. The architecture dissected.
- ·3 min read
Subagents That Catch What Hooks Can't
Hooks block known-bad patterns. Subagents make the judgement calls hooks can't — type safety, architecture compliance, accessibility. One real subagent, dissected, plus a template for writing your own.
- ·3 min read
The Identifier That Made My Podcast Sound Russian
I spent an evening shrinking ElevenLabs chunk size from 2500 characters down to 1000, convinced the model was choking on density. It wasn't. One camelCase identifier — appearing three times in a single paragraph — was making my voice clone drift into a Russian accent. A field note on debugging non-deterministic systems.
- ·3 min read
From Audit to Hook: Turning Drift Into Enforcement
A tooling audit surfaces drift. CLAUDE.md tells the agent not to do it. Hooks make sure it actually doesn't. Eight real scripts from a production codebase, with the audit finding each one came from.
- ·3 min read
The Claude Hooks Lifecycle: A Primer You Can Bookmark
Eight events, one JSON payload format, three exit codes that matter. The reference doc I wish I had open the first time I wrote a Claude Code hook.
- ·3 min read
Tracking Tokens-Per-Session: The Number Claude Code Hides
Tokens-per-session is the single most useful signal for agentic coding sessions — and Claude Code doesn't show it. /usage gives you cost. /context gives you window percent. Neither sums to the number you actually want. Here's what to track, why, and how to put it on your statusline.
- ·3 min read
Your Statusline is the Cheapest Feedback Loop in Agentic Coding
Most teams using Claude Code, Cursor, or Aider leave the statusline at default. It's a one-line strip of pixels that costs you nothing, sees zero tokens, and can change every decision you make during a session.
