Nothing But Words

Video from my RubyConf talk on AI assisted coding is live!

I spent the first 10 years or so of my career (going back to the 90s here, folks) in the Waterfall/BDUF era: long meetings discussing endless hypothetical scenarios, big planning documents covering months of work, missed deadlines, and deliverables that t…

This post was originally going to be about AI-assisted planning, but if you’re a Claude Code user, you may be experiencing the same frustration I have recently with Opus 5: it’s often incomprensible.

Update August 23, 2026: I wrote this post a month ago, which is a long time in the AI coding world, and I have an updated recommendation: always use the (or ) skill instead of .

I drafted this post after RailsConf in 2018, and very belatedly realized I never published it.

I’ve been using Rspec since 2012 and in all this time I’ve never had a really clear picture of how to best use .

File this under small problems that take more time than they should to solve, and I couldn’t find an answer with a web search.

Hello world!

My father passed away on May 10 last year, after a short and unexpected battle with cancer (aside from some back pain, he was doing fine just a few weeks earlier).

This is my first post about Magic: The Gathering, which I’ve been playing for years.