Claude Code understands one repo at a time. Most teams have thirty. Microservices, shared libraries, infrastructure-as-code, frontend apps, data pipelines, all in separate git repos. Start Claude Code in one and ask about another, and it has no context. It doesn’t know the workspace exists. Here’s how I’ve been setting...

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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 useful, but they don’t tell you what to practice. In my previous post on intelligent Engineering principles, I outlined the ideas that guide how I build software with AI. Since then, I’ve had people ask: “Where do I start? What skills should I build first?” This post answers...

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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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Using AI coding assistants to introduce, automate, and evolve quality checks in your project. I have talked about teams needing to have a world class developer experience as a pre-requisite for a well functioning team. When teams lack such a setup, the most common response is a lack of time...

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Why it’s harder for a professional developer to use a tool despite the wide variety of choices Coding assistants like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Aider, OpenCode, JetBrains AI etc. have been making the news for the last few months. Yet, the choice of tools is a lot...

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