Daz

Yesterday I finally got around to posting Minimum Specs, Maximum Vibes which was a draft I had kicking around for a while but hadn't finished.

Update — 2026-07-24 There's a follow-up to this post: Software Factories and Vibes, a response to Dex Horthy's Why Software Factories Fail and some thoughts on what this experiment proves and what it doesn't.

I built a fake CRM to parody modern UX dark patterns.

You've probably seen the famous skateboard-to-car agile development meme.

The marketing around "self-healing software" suggests that with AI your systems can fix themselves.

At the latest Claude Code Anonymous meetup in Brighton, someone gave a lightning talk on prompts for "humanising" AI writing.

When building integrations, you have to deal with the difficulties of working with distributed systems.

I've been hosting projects on AWS and GCP for years.

Starting point I want to build an LLM from scratch in Rust, following Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) but reimplementing everything in Rust with Candle.

The core problem: context engineering Most developers now use AI tools daily, and a growing share of committed code is AI-assisted.

I was a senior developer who resisted AI coding.

I've seen claims that being polite to Claude improves the performance.

Update — 2026-07-24 This post is dated.

Starting point There's a long tradition of learning by building --- from Papert's constructionism to modern project-based curricula.

Update — 2026-07-24 I ended this post admitting I still wasn't comfortable not reading the code.

Last week I read AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming in The Register.

I recently built an internal data tool my team needed.

I've already written about context engineering as the core discipline of building AI systems.

I recently wrote about how I work with AI coding agents and about code review in AI-augmented development.

Years of running production systems give you something that's not in the code.

Update — 2026-07-24 This post is dated.

These days I spend much more of my development time reviewing code than writing it myself.

Update — 2026-03-04 I outlined this post a while ago but never finished it.

Yes, the irony of using a bot to build bot protection is not lost on me.

Update — 2026-03-01 This post has been superseded by How I Work with AI Coding Agents.

Update — 2026-03-01 This post has been superseded by How I Work with AI Coding Agents.

Warning This post is a little different to my usual technical blog posts.

Update — 2026-03-01 This post has been superseded by How I Work with AI Coding Agents.

Update — 2026-07-23 Moltbot was renamed OpenClaw within days of this post going out, which tells you something about the pace of all this.

Update — 2026-02-07 Re-phrased some parts to be clearer and to add the important Nolan Lawson insight "We Mourn Our Craft".

Over the past few months, in my spare time, I've been working on my side-project, Zero Waste Tickets, where I make heavy use of HTMX, server-rendered HTML, and a few bits of vanilla JavaScript for interactions.

I'm bringing the blog back.