The 80/20 principle in software

According to Vilfredo Pareto https en wikipedia org wiki Vilfredo_Pareto 80 percent or more of outputs come from 20 percent or less of inputs This is known as the 80 20 principle sometimes called the 80 20 rule The universe is as Richard Koch https ric...

Begin with the end in mind

Inspired by Tim Ferriss https tim blog and his approach to product validation I have added a new skill to my skills repo https github com jodysalt skills to help me micro test the market before actually building the product add landing page Here is an ...

Give your coding agent a glossary

Mixing domain language can cause confusion and muddy the picture Here is a good example Imagine you are a software engineer and I ask you to build a DB transfer management system Your first thoughts might be that you need to build some sort of database...

You might not need MCP

Today I have been tuning a spam filter on Blognami https blognami com and I wanted to make it easy for Claude Code to analyse spam that has slipped through the net My initial instinct was to bolt on a Model Context Protocol https en wikipedia org wiki ...

Give your coding agent a sandbox

Today I have added a new run in sandbox https github com jodysalt skills blob main skills run in sandbox SKILL md skill to my skills repo https github com jodysalt skills Its primary use case is to make it super simple to run tests potentially in paral...

We live in strange times

We live in very strange and uncertain times Within the last year I have gone from just tinkering with AI to using it as a core part of my dev workflow Large language models have gotten really good at doing a version of what you tell them The challenge ...

Challenging assumptions in AI

Coding agents such as Claude Code are very good at producing a version of what you want When coming up with a design for a solution the underlying large language model LLM is going to make a bunch of assumptions derived from the collective opinion of a...

What doing burpees teaches me about systems

For about a year and a half now I have been doing burpees as the core of my fitness regime For most of that time I have been following the Busy Dad Training https busydadtraining com program though latterly I now do a modified version Here is an overvi...

Inline-executed metaprompting

I want to share an idea I have been playing with There isn t a standard term for it but for now I am calling it inline executed metaprompting I am a big fan of metaprogramming https en wikipedia org wiki Metaprogramming I love languages like Ruby and J...

Tactical vs. strategic programming

I have been thinking a lot latterly about what we as software engineers should be doing going forwards in a world with AI In his book A Philosophy of Software Design John Ousterhout describes two types of programmers 1 The tactical programmer someone w...