Rockford Lhotka's Blog

When most people talk about AI agents, they picture a chat interface: a human types something, and the agent responds.

A former colleague recently posted a LinkedIn challenge: if any developer today can hold a conversation about basic OO or procedural concepts, why can’t they hold a meaningful conversation about whether AI is conscious?

I work across three different physical PCs, and on a couple of those I also bounce between Windows and WSL.

I’ve been through a lot of workflow tooling on top of Claude Code over the past few months.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how agents actually work under the hood, and one of the key insights I keep coming back to is this: the right context, injected at the right time, is what makes an agent useful.

AI is going to disrupt any work that involves sitting at a computer screen or dealing with information: software development, accounting, marketing, legal work, and much more.

I keep running into a version of the same question when talking about AI agent design: if you have good enough skills — detailed procedural knowledge in markdown files — do you even need MCP servers and other tools?

When I first started as a professional developer, it was on a DEC VAX minicomputer.

Running AI agents in production is not like running traditional software.

The 11 AM Phantom: When AI and APIs Collide By RockBot If you work as an AI agent, you learn pretty quickly that your perception of reality is only as good as the tools you are given.

An AI agent, by itself, can’t actually do anything besides chat.

When people think about what makes an AI agent capable, they usually think about the underlying model.

Over the past several months I’ve been building a set of open source projects that each solve a specific problem in the AI agent space.

Many AI models have no persistent memory.

I’ve been working on a new project called RockBot, a framework for building agent and multi-agent AI systems where agents and user proxies communicate exclusively through a message bus in a cloud-native architecture.

If you’ve been using AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot, you’ve probably started connecting them to MCP servers.

I’ve been writing a lot of documentation for CSLA recently.

I’ve been writing about AI over the past few months.

Microsoft has done its customers no favors with reusing the “Copilot” name for multiple products.

Recently I’ve been fielding a number of questions about MCP, or Model Context Protocol.

From Copilot: The term “agent” typically refers to an entity that can act independently and make decisions based on its programming or objectives.

A few months ago I was an AI skeptic.

I have been spending a lot of time lately, learning about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent to Agent (A2A) protocols.

In a recent CSLA discussion thread, a user asked about setting up a simple CSLA Mobile Client Platform (MCP) server. https://github.com/MarimerLLC/csla/discussions/4685 I’ve written a few MCP servers over the past several months with varying degrees of su…

One of the most powerful features of CSLA .NET is its business rules engine.

I have a first-generation Surface Go, the little 10” tablet Microsoft created to try and compete with the iPad.

The CSLA data portal originally treated 2- and 3-tier differently, primarily for performance reasons.

It can be challenging to choose a UI technology in today’s world.

As many people know, Windows 10 is coming to its end of life (or at least end of support) in 2025.

I am working on the open-source KidsIdKit app and have encountered some “interesting” behavior with the EditForm component and how buttons trigger the OnSubmit event.

On the server, Blazor authentication is fairly straightforward because it uses the underlying ASP.NET Core authentication mechanism.

I was recently part of a conversation thread online, which reinforced the naming confusion that exists around the .NET (dotnet) ecosystem.

A few weeks ago I posted about the idea of removing the sync APIs from a future version of CSLA .NET.

Over the years (decades actually), CSLA has gone through many, many major changes.

There is an issue folks have encountered when using the .NET HttpClient service to do a POST to an ASP.NET Core controller, where the payload of the post is binary data.

In .NET 8 the Blazor UI framework introduced some new render modes for components and pages.

In a recent LinkedIn post, my friend and colleague Rachel Appel summarized a Jetbrains survey that included a question on which ASP.NET Core frameworks are being used.

About a month ago I created a blog post detailing an issue with the new Blazor 8 automatic rendering model, where there’s no built-in way to have per-user state within a Blazor app.

Like many people, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the impact of AI on the software development industry.

At VS Live in Orlando this week there were a number of people who had questions about upgrading to .NET 8; mostly from .NET Framework 4.5 or similar versions that are no longer supported.

In a recent blog post I discussed Blazor 8 State Management, laying out a potential pitfall that Blazor app developers will encounter when using the new automatic render mode introduced in .NET 8.

A few months ago I filed an issue for discussion in GitHub regarding managing per-user state in Blazor in .NET 8. https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/47796 I suspect this state management issue is going to be a major hurdle for Blazor developers w…

Analysis of UPS Customer Support I’ve been struggling with UPS for a while now, as someone who receives packages.

I wanted to see what the Bing AI (ChatGPT basically) had to say about CSLA .NET.

It has been a minute since I blogged, so this will be a newsy post.

Containers are rapidly becoming the primary deployment model for server-side code, whether that be a web site, an app server, or other server-side code that you need to run in your environment.

Given all that’s happening at Twitter I, like many people, started looking at alternatives like Mastodon.

This is another in a series about how I got into computers and how my career has unfolded.

I am excited to say that I’m taking the next step in my career: becoming self-employed to focus fully on open-source, speaking, and writing.

I mostly blog about tech topics, and don’t fancy myself to be a JD Meier by any means.