Production agentic systems decompose problems and use the right tool for each step. Most developers hand the AI the whole problem. That’s the gap. Teams building production AI workflows have developed patterns for making AI reliable. Developers using AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot mostly haven’t adopted...

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Developers using AI estimate they’re 24% faster. A randomised controlled trial measured them at 19% slower. That’s from METR’s 2025 study. These were experienced open-source developers working on their own codebases with tools they chose. Their self-assessment was off by over 40 percentage points. If your perception of AI’s impact...

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Most people use AI coding agents backwards. They hand the agent a problem and ask it to solve the whole thing. The agent reads, reasons, generates, and hopes for the best. There’s a better way. One that’s cheaper, more predictable, and already well understood. It’s the Unix philosophy, applied to...

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Principles are easy. Application is hard. I’ve written about intelligent Engineering principles and the skills needed to build with AI. But I kept getting the same question: “How do I actually set this up on a real project?” This post answers that question. I’ll walk through the complete setup, using...

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Same model, different tools, different results. If you’ve used Claude Sonnet in Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf, you’ve noticed this. The model is identical, but the behavior varies. This isn’t magic. It’s context engineering.

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Software engineering is changing. Again. I’ve spent the last two years applying AI across prototyping, internal tools, production systems, and team workflows. I’ve watched it produce an elegant solution in seconds, then confidently generate code calling APIs that don’t exist. I’ve seen it save hours on boilerplate and cost hours...

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Moving beyond tools: habits, prompts, and patterns for working well with AI In the last post — AI for Software Engineering, not (only) Code Generation — we explored how AI is transforming software engineering beyond just writing code. Now, let’s look at what that means for teams and individuals in...

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